Ulysses - The Ultimate Writing App App Reviews

This is, by far, the best app for notes and writing. It is incredibly versatile while remaining easy to use. I love that is has great keyboard shortcuts, search, and markdown support. Sync is super fast and reliable. Together with the Mac app, this is my new notes and writing. It is a bit more expensive than other notes and writing apps, but you get what you pay for. This is quality stuff.

Really enjoying this app. Its making me write more. The iPhone addition is a huge plus!

iPhone support finally here and its brilliant. I use this on my Mac and after a (somewhat) short iCloud syncing Im all up and running with the same great feel as the desktop app. As a power user, I hope the team expands the functionality of the tags a bit, such as allowing share sheets to tag and more sophisticated operations on Filter Groups (eg excluding things matching a tag or search term). Thanks to the developers for such a gem!

I dont normally post reviews, but Ulysses Mobile is just about perfect. I do wish there was automatic theme switching, and organizing content is a bit weird, but thats just nitpicking the best writing app on the App Store. Bravo!

Ive looked at what feels like every single writing app on the App Store. Im a songwriter primarily, and I need something clean, beautiful, and distraction free with which to write my lyrics. Notes is ugly and doesnt offer distraction free writing. iA Writer is too expensive for so little in way of actual features, and I dont like the font or colors they force you to use. 1Writer was good until recently, when after an update iCloud sync made the app buggy and slow. Since then, Ive been waiting impatiently for Ulysses for iPhone, having seen the overwhelmingly positive response to the Mac version. Now here it is, and its honestly more than I could have ever hoped for. Clean and beautiful, distraction free, iCloud document sync is quick and without too much lag. Those were really my only requirements, but Ive been happily surprised how many other features there are in this app. Word search, word count, trackable goals, undo/redo, and most importantly Markup! Ive never used Markup because I didnt want to take the time to memorize all the syntax. But Ulysses provides you with a toolbar filled with insertable Markup syntax and other formatting options that are dead simple to use and edit, and are incredibly powerful. What Id like to see: 1. Option to specify whether word search returns word fragments, whole words, or both (currently does both) 2. Search for sheets, groups, and filters 3. Ability to reach settings from menu Those are all small changes though. I cant think of any major improvements to make at the moment. Definitely expensive, but totally worth it, and Id rather pay $20 for a great app than $3 for a mediocre one.

Tried many different apps to help me focus on writing; Ulysses does it the best

Ive tried other writing programs, some of which helped me decided to switch to a Mac, but this is by far my favorite and Im just so excited that it now works with iPhone! So since I paid for it when it was iPad only, I can just download it to my phone. My only feedback would be more options for icons please, I usually cant find a good fit.

A elegantly designed app, to be sure. But without in-app search across all your documents, I cant recommend it. The developer told me to use Spotlight and hinted this would be added in a later version. But also problematic is the lack of a keyword index. You have to manually create a separate filter for each keyword (tag). Both keyword lists and search are included in much cheaper competitor apps, making it hard to recommend this to anyone who isnt already using the desktop app.

Still prefer IA writer as it offers the same minus a lot of distractions. The point of plain text is just that. Its just as tap intensive here as it is on Word, but I get none of the formatting options. This app is incredibly fluid. Things feels right and move smoothly. Minus leaving the editor or entering it. Organization seems the strong point here and Im curious if this system works well with other applications or operating systems. Customization was a little fun but mostly distracting.

The writing app of my dreams. Easy to use, intuitive, simple to back up from MacBook to iPad to iPhone. I will never worry about version control again. Even using the Markup language instead of WYSIWYG is becoming second nature. And it eliminates the reformatting method of procrastination I tend toward. Im so glad I learned of this app, and its exciting to see how much development its receiving. I cant wait to see where it goes next.

Fantastic app, great interface, clear and focused experience in addition to super useful features. Easily one of the best examples of how robust an iPad app can be.

I switched from Scrivener a few months back because as much as I loved it, it was so cluttered and the often promised app never materialized. Ulysses is visually more pleasing and has all the major organizational, writing, and markdown features I need. I immediately bought both the Mac version and iPad app and was thrilled. Though I knew an iPhone app was in the works, I was happy to have a mobile option with my iPad. Now that the iPhone app is out, its pure perfection! It works just like the Mac and iPad versions and syncs seamlessly. I have a ton of folders and sheets and syncing is no problem. Plus, the app supports TextExpander which is super helpful. Hats off to the development team. Well done!

This app makes me want to write more.

Doesnt come close to the utility of the desktop version. No Dropbox support. Publishing to blogs is limited. I really want to like it but I always keep going back to Byword.

For the longest time, Ive given Ulysses 1-star reviews due to its (PREVIOUS) mishandling of large documents, remarking, over and over again, how it couldnt even handle the very book that its named after. At long last, that seems to be a thing of the past. Theres still a bit of lag with larger documents, no doubt, but its no longer as big a deal, let alone no longer flat out unusable. Id give it 5 stars, but its still missing some features that would make, again, writing long works much easier—like being able to jump to different sections (headers/chapters; however you wish to define them) as, perhaps, a window that you can pull in from the right side (instead of only having attachments available) or as a button that pulls down a list of headers, especially considering the syntax defining these headers exists within the markdown itself. Another nice feature would be for it to highlight all instances of your string while using Find (or, again, to have some sort of list of all instances appear not unlike iBooks has). In a word, even though I appreciate the clean interface, it feels like theres a lot of wasted (hidden) space. If it had the latter, the former could of course be emulated by simply searching for "#" as a string using the Find feature, but it has neither. All that said, even though Im still going to be using a more feature-rich text editor, this is (finally) an amazing app. Even as I was critical of it before, Ive always admitted that its supporting custom CSS stylesheets and the simplicity of converting from Markdown to various formats in it makes it worth having alone. And it still does. This is still my goto Markdown converter on both Mac and iOS.

I like Ulysses very much. I just can not delete any filters and groups. Please add Touch ID passcode. Thank you!

Doesn’t come close to the utility of the desktop version. No Dropbox support. Publishing to blogs is limited. I really want to like it but keep going back to Byword.

I love keeping my writing with me. By far the best writing app on Mac and iOS.

Ulysses is an impressive, beautiful, smooth, stress-free, rock-solid, dependable app that is full of customizable features that makes any kind of writing pretty dogone enjoyable, much faster and more effortless. Been using it on all my devices for a long while now, and still love it, especially with this last update which added even more fantastic features and iPhone capabilities. Use it a lot for my college work.

A simple, seamless writing experience across all my Apple devices.