A Letter From The Soulmen

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Hi there,

this is Marcus from the Soulmen. Please allow me to introduce you to Ulysses III.

This app is the culmination of 18 months of hard work, sweat and tears, built upon a 10 years’ experience creating writers’ software for the Mac and iOS.

It is based on the simple idea of a one-stop place for all your texts, be it small snippets, or large, life-spanning projects. It’s built to inspire, to encourage experimentation, and to grow steadily along with whatever you’ll throw at it.

If you’re new to this, then please enjoy what we believe is the greatest text editor the world has ever seen. A blank slate powered by a toolset of endless possibilities, limited only by your imagination as a writer.

If you’re coming from Ulysses 2, you’re in for some hardcore culture shock. Make no mistake: This is all-new, all-different, and there is no sense in trying to apply any of its rules to Ulysses III. So just treat this as you would any other new product, and don’t try to hunt down old features or recreate behaviors — chances are you won’t find them. You’ll have to start over. You’ll hate it. You’ll love it. Trust me.

Now… this is just the start. We will update and refine this baby on a steady basis, and as a matter of fact, we just did. Ulysses III 1.1 is a vast improvement over what we shipped in April, with lots of user-requested features molded in, polished and licked clean.

Please remember, though, that we are humans, and thus far from being perfect. There will be shortcomings, errors even, and you will have questions. We are anxiously awaiting your feedback — good, bad, mostly good hopefully —, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Lastly, understand that this is a product of pure dedication. We’re a small team, we love what we do, and we care deeply about it. We — that’s Max Seelemann, Marcus Fehn, Friedrich Gräter, Götz Fabian and Lucas Hauswald.

We are the Soulmen, and this is Ulysses III.

It’s yours now. Explore, play around. Have fun.

Marcus Fehn | The Soulmen September 2013

Overview

By now you’ve probably skipped this introduction and manically clicked on what few buttons are visible on screen. That’s alright, let it out.

As soon as you’re ready, we should cover some basics:

1. Ulysses III is what we call an “enhanced plain text editor”. Everything you see — headlines, lists and emphasis — is just typed in. We will come back to this later.

2. Ulysses III is a single-library app, and all your texts live in this single library. There is no “Open”, no “Save”, no Finder access — it all happens right inside this window.

3. Ulysses III fully utilizes iCloud, i.e. if you have iCloud set up and enabled, Ulysses will store everything on Apple’s super-modern mega-clusters. You can then access your texts from all of your Macs, as long (or as soon) as you’re connected to the web.

Most importantly, Ulysses III is built to grow and adapt. You can use it as a sophisticated notepad, you can create your next American Novel. You can feed your blog, keep everything neatly organized, or mess around at will.

There is no “right” way to do things here, so make yourself comfortable, and make it your own.

Ok, but how do I…?

If you have used any kind of three-pane-app before, you should have no problem navigating and using Ulysses. And if you’re familiar with the likes of Markdown and Textile, you should even feel right at home in the editor. There may be a few special cases where we’re handling things a bit differently, but all in all this should be rather common ground.

Anyway, UI-Overview from left to right:

• SIDEBAR
• SHEET LIST
• EDITOR

And that’s it. The sidebar is divided into sections and should be pretty self-explanatory. Depending on whether you’ve got iCloud enabled, or whether you’re a user of Daedalus Touch, you will see different sections, but these are no-brainers.

The sheet list is where all your texts reside.

And this here is the editor.

OH-KEY! But HOW DO I…?

You add groups and filters via the sidebar’s plus menu, and you add sheets via CMD-N. If you select a group in the sidebar, its contents will show up in the sheet list. Select a sheet, and it shows up in the editor.

Filters are a special kind of group. Once set up, they will look at the group they’re in and list all sheets that match the set criteria. For example, you can set up a filter that only lists sheets with a keyword of “fantastic”. If you place it deep within a nested group, say, six levels down, the filter will only show matching sheets within that very group.

You can even select multiple groups and filters (by holding down CMD), and get their combined contents listed in the sheet column.

It’s the sheets, baby!

All writing is done on Ulysses’ sheets. Sheets are somewhat equivalent to classic documents, though they don’t require a “title” or a “file name” or such.

Sheets can hold any amount of text, and you can freely move sheets around and sort them at will. You can also select multiple sheets and glue them together (CMD-J). They will then behave as a single sheet in the editor, which is especially cool if you rather have a lot of small chunks than a single, monolithic wall of text.

But again, there is no right or wrong way here, and different projects will require different approaches. Just experiment and see what works best for you.

Added bonus

Since sheets are likely to live in the vicinity of other sheets, we figured it would be nice if you could easily navigate between them — right from within the editor. There are keyboard shortcuts for this (CMD-ALT-up/down), but if you’re equipped with a Magic Mouse or trackpad, you can simply scroll to the top or bottom and “pull to switch”.

You should try this now to get the hang of it. Just come back here, as we’re about to look at the cool stuff.