As a closet technophobe, I rarely write about specific bits of technology. The one exception I can think of was my lament for the passing of Bill Atkinson‘s Hypercard – “Programming for the rest of us”. But the other day, after some slightly intrusive interruptions asking me if I wanted to update my version of Ulysses , I did and was struck by how much I enjoyed using this word processor. And then had the urge to share my enjoyment with others.
For many years I used to write with a very early version of Nisus. I migrated it from machine to machine. What I liked was that it felt very clean, didn’t get in my way, had some sophisticate search and replace features and produced very pure text, free from invisible garbage.
When I switched to Mac OSX, my friend Ben Copsey urged me to stop using applications that only ran in Classic mode. So, a bit reluctantly, I bought the latest version of Nisus. Like many improved bits of software I found it had lost some of the qualities that had made it so pleasant to use – particularly that hard to define, but easy to recognise, quality of being clean.
I experimented with a variety of word processors, but couldn’t find one to match my old version of Nisus. Among the ones I downloaded for a free trial was Ulysses. It wasn’t love at first sight. Ulysses looks and feels very different from any other word processor I have ever used. In fact, it is more a writing environment than a word processor.
What the Blue Technologies Group has done is to produce a tool for writers as opposed to office workers and in doing so have created a genuine innovation in the kind application where it looked as if all the innovating had been done.
Apart from the fact that its look and feel is so different from other writing tools, there are lots of things that will put people off. For a start, while it has some fairly primitive formatting tools – I say this without having used them – you need to switch into some other programme to format what you have written. But the biggest obstacle is that you have to use it for a while before its virtues become apparent.
Its greatest virtue is that it lets you focus on writing with few distractions. For example, I am writing this on a black screen with the words I write appearing in green – nothing else. No menus, no toolbars, no icons, just words. But even writing in its other mode made up of a number of windows and a menubar, it still feels very clean and focused.
So if you write anything more complex than very short documents or the odd letter and if you use a Mac, take a look at Ulysses, try the free download and use it for the thirty days or so they give you. I think you may be pleasantly surprised.