No Panes, No Glory

There are plenty of text editors for general writing, and for screenplays. There are outliners. Ulysses Logo There are notebook organizers. But until now writers of books and other complex works have been left out in the cold.

The problem is that extensive texts are not usually written all at once, or stored in a single document. A recently- completed job of mine, for example—a 400-page plus book manuscript, is the result of many concepts and ideas that were distributed in a sprawl of different documents stored in folders on my computer. I primarily used NoteTaker (AquaMinds Software) to research and compile most of my text, and Stickies for on-the-fly brainstorms. I also had to transcribe notes from my microcassette recorder, and ideas jotted down on Post-its and legal pads. Organizing, assembling and arranging pieces of information from such varied sources—and keeping track of a lengthy work in progress—is tedious and time consuming.

Now, thanks to The Blue Technologies Group, authors can have their say with Ulysses, a unique word processor (€100, $120 US; academic version, €50, $60 US) expressly designed to accommodate the typically nonlinear workflow of creative writing: an organic process that evolves non-sequentially, often in bits and pieces. Ulysses has one primary objective: let the writer focus on creating content instead of trying to manage an unwieldy array of documents, or concerning himself with onscreen text formatting.Concept

Ulysses is an intuitive tool that allows writers to see all the disparate parts of a project at-a-glance. A well-designed layout of windows—or panes—provides a structure for the way you work.

The application has a single window interface. This is composed of several integrated panes that include: the editor, notepad, control panel, and browser (Figure 1).

Main Window

Figure 1. Ulysses offers an interface featuring multiple active open windows at a glance. The sceen is divided into integrated scrollable panes (much like web browser displaying a frames-based website), enabling you to better organize and structure your writing content. Note that open document tabs appear at the top. Control clicking on most objects brings up a menu of options

      You begin by opening a project as a single file that contains all the text file documents associated with the project. When you open a project you’ve been working on all related text files are included within their panes, making organization a snap.

     You can work on any document (chapter, act, etc.) of your manuscript without having to open and close any number of separate documents as you would with a traditional word processor. Instead of having to open each text document individually, the titles of open project documents are displayed in tabs directly above the editor, a handy concept similar to the Bookmarks Bar in the Safari browser used for storing links to favorite sites. You have quick access to each open tabbed file, and, if several documents are open, you can switch among them by clicking on their respective tab. When you get that brilliant insight for a new chapter, Command-N opens a new document in the tabbed area.

     Dragging and dropping an existing text file onto the application icon, or its alias, launches Ulysses and imports the file into a new project. If a project is already open, the dropped text file gets imported as a new document in the tabs area of the existing project. You can also open new projects and import text files from the project dropdown menu. But note that all pre-existing formatting you have done on a text file is lost when imported into Ulysses; it is an authoring tool, not a layout or type styling tool.

Two if by See

     Each document in Ulysses has two independent text fields: the Editor and its associated Note Pad. The Editor, which is for your main writing, also has a split view—a feature that provides a second view of your current document in the lower part of the editor pane, allowing you to have one section of your text visible while editing another section at the same time.

     The Note Pad is extremely useful for what its name implies. When, for example, you are working on a chapter and you have a thought for that section but are not yet sure where it should go, you simply jot down your idea in the Note Pad. You can cut and paste text into the note pad for later use elsewhere, and you can drag and drop images into the Note Pad, too. (It would also be handy to drop an active link in the Note Pad pane. Perhaps we’ll get that in a future release.)

     For purists, Ulysses also has a full screen-editing mode, in which the Editor fills the entire screen, providing a view of your primary document without the distractions of the other panes, or the menu bar. There’s nothing on the screen to distract you but your words.

The Browser and Control Panes

While you can select open documents from the tabs area located at the top of the interface, the browser pane (Figure 2) contains and displays every saved document in the project by category: status, label, title, and time stamp. The browser also features a search mode. Depending on the specified search criteria, you can search for terms in the editor, the note pad, document titles, or the entire project. All documents in the browser appear at the same level, and you can, of course, sort them. One feature request I would like implemented is a hierarchical structure for organizing and viewing files in the browser in the same way documents are stored withinfolders in the OS X Finder.

Browser

Figure 2. The Browser is the window into the project. This pane provides access to all your saved documents, and you globally search the entire project. A selected document displays content plus any associated notes in the preview windows below. Double-clicking on a document opens it in the main editor pane

The control pane (Figure 3), which is located on the lower right of the interface, lets you assign a document title and three additional sorting criteria (status, label, time stamp). Two pop-up menus in the control panel let you assign a status (new, draft, final, etc.) and a label (concept, character, plot, chapters, etc.) to the current document. Document statistics (word count, characters, pages, paragraphs, lines) are also shown.

Control Panel

Figure 3. The Control Pane provides document statistics, and you can select criteria fields for sorting from title, status, label, and time stamp. Document state indicators are displayed in the lower left: new, unsaved, or the changed status of a document.

Formatting

Since this program is intended for content generation, not type or page layout, traditional word processing frills have been rigorously pruned. Its few formatting options are available only when exporting a document to another, format-friendly application.

Familiar onscreen page formatting like margins, center, and indent, or text formatting like boldface, italics, curly quotes, or underlined is absent; and, you cannot, for example, mix fonts in the editor pane.

Control Panel

Figure 4. Editor Pane: Ulysses does not support on-screen formatting. You can, however, mark or tag text with styles that will create the desired text formatting when the document is exported for use with another application. In this example, the words highlighted in yellow marker will be in italics, the word “book” sandwiched by tags :: will be in boldface, and the paragraph in red preceded by tags %% will be a heading with a heavier font.

Without the burden and distraction of design, the author can concentrate on developing content while organizing documents within the project structure. Although onscreen formatting or printing formatted text is not an option in Ulysses, you can mark or tag words to generate formatted text when outputting a document for use with another application (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Here is the marked and tagged text formatted after being outputted to Microsoft Word.

Ulysses allows documents to be exported individually or coherently—the entire project as a single document—into several export formats: Plain Text, Rich Text (Word file) or in LaTeX. When you export a document, you are guided through an export project window where you make selections toward customizing your output, which includes formatting text (Figures 6, 7, 8).

control=

Figure 6. To print or work with a project document in another application, you must export it first by choosing a format (Plain Text, Rich Format/Word, LaTeX), and then make selections from a wide array of options in the Export Project window. You can export single documents, or the entire project

Figure 7. Full Screen mode: With this option, all panes in Ulysses are closed. You can write and edit without any on-screen distractions. Note: you can customize the screen color and font, and you can access an invisible scrollbar on the right only when hovering over it with your mouse.

Figure 8. Although Ulysses does not permit on-screen formatting, you can customize the look and feel of the interface by selecting other options from Preferences. In the editor tab, try checking “typewriter scrolling” for a neat mode of inserting text.

Your exported document will display any marked or tag-selected text (italics, boldface, etc.) in the new exported format—but not in Plain Text, which does not support formatting. To work with files created with the LaTeX plug-in requires a complete install of the freely available LaTeX system. On my last project, for example, to add page numbers, headings, and so on, I exported to Rich Text, then saved my project documents as Microsoft Word files. While these formatting procedures are not intuitive, the process is easy to grasp once you begin using the program.

Summary Thoughts

By taking the organizational grunt work out of the multilayered and often disjointed creative writing process, Ulysses is ideal for the freeform thinker, writer, and doer. Ulyses comes with a 3-computer unlimited-user license and free updates for 1.x versions. I will definitely spend a lot of quality time with this app for my next book.

Download the 30-day demo of Ulysses, focus on your content, and launch an odyssey of your own that’s worth reading.

Ulysses http://www.blue-tec.com
Demo http://www.blue-tec.com/ulysses/downloads.php

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Eden Maxwell is an artist and published book author. He has contributed to many publications, including Popular Science, Art Calendar Magazine, Drachen Foundation Journal, Popular Mechanics, MacStreet Journal Online, Omni, MacUser, MacDigest, and Computer Gaming World. His art has been exhibited on both coasts and his work has appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Visit Eden's Atelier and Gallery website. You may also reach him via email at artist@edensart.com