The latest entry in our classic app series reimagined apps for people who were keen to get their first novel out. The result? Very much the write stuff.
The original Mac version of Ulysses.
What was Ulysses?
An app for writers, initially for Mac and then for iPad and iPhone, geared toward people getting ideas down for a complex piece of work – and then figuring out how to stitch it all together.
Why was it a classic?
Unlike word processors, which create linear documents, Ulysses from its earliest days encouraged you to keep notes and excerpts. Its flexible interface enabled these to be combined, reordered and divided. Roll in cross-device sync and a distraction-free full-screen view and you have the perfect writing tool for many people.
Where is it now?
Still on the App Store – and regularly updated with new features.
Visit the Ulysses website or get Ulysses ($39.99/£39.99 per year) from the App Store. Ulysses is also available as part of Setapp ($12.49 per month)
A modern incarnation of Ulysses on iPad.
Q&A: a brief history of Ulysses
We speak to Ulysses co-founder Marcus Fehn about how Ulysses came to be – and thrived in the decades since its initial release.
What was the genesis of Ulysses?
In 1999, I began working on a novel while freelancing as a graphic designer. I was at a computer all day and would jot down ideas, snippets and research in whichever app I had handy. Eventually, I moved everything to BBEdit, which had basic document switching, but found myself frustrated at having to come up with document names or use post-it note apps for extras. So one day I started to mock up my ‘perfect writing app’.
What problems were you trying to solve?
I never could come up with meaningful file names for unfinished work, and still find it almost physically painful to name a sketch, idea or mere thought. It somehow contradicts the content of the idea. If I churn out ten paragraphs of brainstorming madness, I can’t meaningfully title that.
Another issue was the chaotic nature of my creative process. I was using a Mac in an almost analog fashion. But I couldn’t actually attach a post-it to a file. And although I could group documents in folders, this wasn’t like real paper where you can rearrange documents into a new sequence, or work on more than one at once.
Lastly, I wanted an always-on app into which I could dump anything that was on my mind.
How did you realize these ideas on the Mac?
When Ulysses launched, there was no competition – which meant we had to come up with everything on our own. There was no Markdown, so we had to create our own markup syntax. I wanted tabs like in web browsers, which was a new concept at the time. I required manual sorting and multi-document previews, auto-save, and a dedicated full-screen mode… The list went on and on.
Daedalus for iPad.
And how did the move to touchscreens impact Ulysses?
People use the app for long-form writing, which means a lot of text and long-term commitment. When you have the work of your lifetime in an app, you need it to be reliable and predictable. So we had to find a way to bring everything from the Mac to touch devices, which could mean videos in – or 20 PDFs attached to – your texts. Plus, sync technology wasn’t there and iOS wasn’t built for our multi-layered document model.
I also felt we couldn’t just copy the Mac experience to iPad, because the tablet was so visual and demanded direct interaction. So we tested the water with Daedalus, an app that had a paper stack metaphor and limited sync with Ulysses. It gave us time to experiment and learn the platform, after which we took the plunge and ported almost everything over.
What was then needed to make Ulysses usable for iPhone?
The most important part was the writing experience. While we tried to bring everything over – all your text, attachments, groups, manual sorting, the exporters – the writing matters most of all. If an editor is poor, nothing will come of it. Fortunately, we weren’t the first writing app on iPhone, and so could explore existing solutions and be inspired by what did and didn’t work.
In previous years, Ulysses had also increasingly stuck to Apple’s design language. That really helped on iPhone, because we could find usable patterns that already existed, while still adding our very own fun or meaningful solutions that fit. The result is not perfect – our app can be big and complicated. But people are so heavily invested in what they write that we thought it better to have functions available than to scrap them from iPhone.
Ulysses for iPhone, from 2017.
What has guided the new features you’ve added over the years?
Requests from specific writers, like scientific authors, which we carefully balance to avoid overloading the app for people that don’t need such features. For example, tables, equations, internal links, and tables of contents cater mainly to academics and aren’t needed by everyone.
Our own love of blogging drove options for working with Ghost, micro.blog and WordPress. And then there’s stuff like Projects, which lets you hide everything but the current project you’re working on. This wasn’t requested as such, but as people’s Ulysses libraries grew, they were trying all kinds of workarounds. We needed a viable solution to help them focus.
What have been your biggest challenges and successes when working on Ulysses?
We are a small team, and spend a lot of time keeping Ulysses up to date, and dealing with Apple’s breakneck speed of adding new stuff. People often don’t realize how much effort is required to support four platforms and ten aspect ratios, and to ensure every new feature is rigorously tested, so we don’t break people’s workflows.
Other big challenges involved dealing with the dogmatic nature of the plaintext movement and variances in Markdown, difficulties with Apple not fixing (and then largely abandoning) its buggy sync system, which we depend on, and moving Ulysses to a subscription. I will never forget the hate we received for that!
As for success, I would say our Apple Design Award, but really it’s that we’re changing people’s lives. Our app helps people express themselves, get heard, get published, and that’s beautiful to know. Writing is such an elemental, universal craft, and yet people struggle until they find the right tool for their character, purpose, or vision. For many people, Ulysses seems to be that tool.
Why has Ulysses lasted so long?
I think because there’s nothing else like it, which comes down to us not looking at other apps to define the Ulysses feature set and instead building out from something we ourselves wanted. One thing I learned early in life is that we are not unique creatures, entirely on our own regarding opinions and preferences. If you like something, chances are others will too. Put your heart into something and it will be successful, just by the simple fact that you are not an island.
