The best writing apps for your Mac, iPad and iPhone. Ulysses is a powerful writing app available on Mac and iOS. About the Author.
If you use a Mac, you work with text. Your documents may be short (tweets and iMessages) or long (reports, stories, or even novels), but you need an app to handle that text.
Depending on the type of writing you do, you may want something as simple as a basic text editor or as complex as a full-featured word processor; if you write code, you want an editor designed for that type of content. I tend to use what have come to be known as focused-writing apps. These apps, increasingly popular of late, allow you to write in a focused environment, export your writings to various formats, possibly apply basic styling, and let you print your work. Unlike a word processor, which has lots of complex features for formatting and styling text, or a text editor, which is better for complex text modifications or working with specific code languages, a focused-writing app takes a minimalist approach, providing just the necessary text tools for writing and then getting out of your way so you can focus on your words. I looked at the top focused-writing apps for OS X to find the best one.
(We’ll look at word processors and code editors in future articles.) What makes a good focused-writing app? Today’s best focused-writing apps are made with writers in mind and offer some or all of the following features:. A distraction-free environment—or at least a special view or mode—that allows you to focus on your writing without worrying about toolbars, palettes and other formatting tools. A full-screen mode, so you can shut out everything else on your Mac’s screen.
Support for the writing language, a simple syntax for formatting plain-text documents that can be easily converted to HTML for use on blogs or web pages. Multiple export formats, such as HTML and RTF, for publishing or sharing your styled text.
(Since OS X lets you, as long as a writing app has a mode or view that shows your text with proper formatting, the app doesn’t need a specific PDF-export feature of its own.). Document statistics. Data such as word count and character count are essential to many writers; some people may also want more-advanced statistics such as reading level and estimated reading time. An iOS companion app is a nice bonus—if you tend to write on both platforms, an OS X app with an iOS cousin lets you easily switch between platforms. (Note for this feature to be useful, the apps must use a common sync platform such as iCloud or Dropbox.) Top choice: iA Writer Information Architects’s $5 wins hands down for simplicity and for its attractive (and only) font. While it doesn’t let you choose your own typeface, the company’s Nitti is a beautiful mono-space font, and working in iA Writer lets you ignore everything around its document view—I often use iA Writer’s full-screen mode to block out the other windows on my Mac. The app also includes a Focus Mode that restricts the view even further, letting you concentrate on a single sentence at a time.
(I’d prefer it if Focus Mode highlighted the current paragraph rather than sentence, since many writers think in terms of paragraphs, but the app’s sentence-level focus seems to be popular.) iA Writer is a minimal, yet powerful writing app. IA Writer’s Markdown support is very good. The app offers a formatting bar at the bottom of the window that lets you quickly apply Markdown formatting, even if you don’t remember which syntax characters to use. You also get a decent Markdown-preview window, though it’s not customizable. In fact, that’s one of iA Writer’s hallmarks, love it or hate it: Little in the app is customizable.
If you don’t like what’s here, you should look elsewhere. But if you like iA Writer’s approach and attractive styling, you’ll find it to be a great tool to write without distractions. There are also iOS version of iA Writer, for iPad and iPhone, and those apps work with iCloud, but you can also use Dropbox to be able to access your files from any app. Top contenders Hog Bay Software’s $10 is a bit like iA Writer with more options. WriteRoom comes with a handful of default themes, and you can download others or even roll your own, if you’re so inclined. You can zoom your text and use any font installed on your Mac, and the app’s Typewriter Mode automatically scrolls your document as you type, similar to how you’d see a piece of paper move in a typewriter. WriteRoom has no Markdown (or other language) preview, however, limiting its usefulness for writing in anything but plain text without an additional app to show what your writing will look like.
WriteRoom lets you choose different themes to suit your preferences. Metaclassy’s $10 falls, feature-wise, somewhere between iA Writer and WriteRoom—it lets you choose between a dark them and a light theme, and it lets you choose your font. But Byword gets Focus Mode right, allowing you to choose either Line Focus or Paragraph Focus.
It’s also got a typewriter mode, it supports rich text, and the premium version (unlocked via a $5 in-app purchase) lets you publish your writings directly to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Scriptogr.am and Evernote. Byword is also available in iPad and iPhone versions, and it syncs your files using iCloud. However, fans of Markdown will want to steer clear (unless they use Marked, below), as Byword’s Markdown preview requires that you toggle between edit and preview mode—you can’t proofread using the preview and make changes to your text at the same time. I like Byword’s paragraph focus, which highlights the paragraph I’m working on while dimming the rest of the document.
Honorable mention Hog Bay Software offers an alternative to WriteRoom called, which, while not exactly a focused-writing app, does something interesting. The $25 app is a combination of a text editor and an outliner: You format your text with Markdown syntax, but you can “fold,” or hide, sections by clicking on header characters. This feature lets you write longer documents, keeping a big-picture view without having to tediously scroll up and down.
You can also move sections around like an outliner, but FoldingText is still, at heart, an app for writing and working with text. When you’ve finished writing, you can export your document to HTML, or copy it to the clipboard as HTML or rich text. FoldingText lets you collapse your document sections, move them around, and reorganize them. The rest of the pack TextEdit Many people can get along just fine with OS X’s built-in TextEdit, which is actually a full-blown word processor. It can handle serious formatting, such as lists and tables; can work with graphics, videos, and audio files; and can export to a variety of formats, including RTF and Word.
But despite its many formatting options, TextEdit is a “plain text” editor at heart—it’s the direct descendant of Apple’s aptly-named SimpleText, and the much older TeachText, both simple tools designed for editing and displaying text documents. It also offers no true distraction-free mode, doesn’t include full-screen mode, and doesn’t explicitly support Markdown formatting, though if you use it in conjunction with Marked 2 (see below), you can write in Markdown and preview your formatted documents. Mou Chen Luo’s is a free (donation requested), Markdown-focused text editor that includes a live preview in a two-pane window: editor on the left, preview on the right. The app includes keyboard shortcuts for Markdown-syntax formatting, and notably offers very good support for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. It’s also very flexible, letting you choose themes—including those you create—for both the composer and preview panes. Mou even lets you post directly to Tumblr and Scriptogr.am, though not to WordPress or Blogger.
However, placing the editor and preview pane in a single window takes up a lot of space, and if you’ve got a dual-display setup, you can’t separate those views so that the editor resides on one display and the preview on the other. You can temporarily hide the preview pane, but the window doesn’t resize, instead expanding the editor pane to twice its width, which can be annoying. Also, you can’t choose which side of the editor the preview pane appears on—I prefer to have my preview to the left of my editor, and I can’t do that with Mou. Mou gives you two panes, the text editor and a preview, in the same window. For Markdown fans: Marked While all of my recommended focused-writing apps handle Markdown syntax to some extent, few shine when it comes to previewing the formatted output (HTML or RTF, for example) of a Markdown document. IA Writer’s preview isn’t customizable; Byword requires you to toggle between composing and previewing; and WriteRoom has no Markdown preview at all. I’ve adopted Brett Terpstra’s $12 (currently at ), which not only provides Markdown previews that are automatically updated to reflect changes you make to your documents, but also lets you customize its display with CSS files that, for example, match your blog or website’s design.
Marked also includes a full range of text-statistic tools, as well as export options—so even if your favorite writing app doesn’t export to your preferred format, it’s likely that you can get such functionality from Marked. In my writing, Marked has proven invaluable, especially for documents with complex formatting—not only is its export-to-HTML feature perfect, but I use my website’s own CSS file for Marked’s preview, so I can see exactly how my writing will look. Marked can also display inline images based on Markdown and HTML links, something the writing apps above can’t do. I couldn’t work without Marked 2 to preview my text documents and export them to HTML.
Bottom line There’s no shortage of writing apps for OS X, for any type of work, and for any budget. You may want to stick with the free TextEdit, or, if you use Markdown, look for a tool that displays formatted texts better. My ideal text editor would have the simplicity of iA Writer, some of the features of ByWord and WriteRoom, and the preview and export features of Marked 2. Sadly, such a dream app doesn’t exist. In its absence, I’ve found iA Writer to be the most useful tool, because it stays out of my way.
The company behind the popular Ulysses writing apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, today announced that it is transitioning to a subscription model going forward. Starting today, Ulysses will be priced at $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year, with a subscription plan unlocking Ulysses for use on all devices.
Ulysses is also offering a student plan with six months of access for $10.99, and there are now two-week free trials available. With a subscription model, the company will be able to do steady, small releases more often, focusing more on the needs of the user base rather than aiming for big updates to lure in new customers. Co-founder Max Seelemann about the new subscription model: 'This step was necessary to put Ulysses' future development on a solid foundation. We weighed several alternatives - paid updates among them - and concluded that the subscription model, as it is available with the App Store since 2016, is best suited to meet both our customers' needs and our needs as developers.'
To encourage existing customers to switch over to the new subscription model, Ulysses is offering a permanent life-long discount on the yearly plan, dropping the price from $40 per year to $30 per year (50% off a monthly subscription). Customers who recently purchased Ulysses for Mac can get up to 12 months of free use, while customers who have purchased the app on an iOS device can get up to six months of free use based on grace periods calculated from the date of purchase. Ulysses plans to inform customers about the offers from within the app. The single-purchase versions of Ulysses have been removed from sale but will remain functional. The apps are updated for High Sierra and iOS 11, but going forward, new features will only be added to the subscription versions of the apps. Ulysses for Mac can be downloaded from the Mac App Store for free.
Ulysses for iOS can be downloaded from the App Store for free. Via the Ulysses Blog: A tiny bit of history Software purchases used to be very different from how they are today. Until not too long ago, you would purchase an application and get a physical copy on a bunch of floppies (or later a CD). The thing you got — that was it. No patches, no updates.
Developers had to put forward an extreme amount of attention to get everything right, because once an app was out, development had to be done. And that’s also what you paid for: A finished product.
Essentially, you paid the development time spent up until the app’s release. New features were then delivered via a new version, and you had to pay again, if you wanted that new version.
Things changed with the advent of the internet, of course. As soon as we had dial-up connections, developers could offer small patches to fix issues that were found after shipping. And once broadband connections were ubiquitously available, larger and more frequent patches were possible.
At first, these resulted in new features being added on-the-fly, but it quickly evolved into issuing more and more substantial patches — until today, where most v1.0s are mere sketches of a future product. I disagree with the way things are today completely. I'm sick and tired of paying $70 for AAA Video games that spend the next 6 months patching bugs and AI issues long after I've beaten the broken game that shipped with thousands of bugs or the balls for that dev to charge me $50 in DLC to get all of the stuff they wanted to ship with the game.
The issue is compounded with Software where developers are shipping (to use Ulysses' words) 'where most v1.0s are mere sketches of a future product.' This also is. Just like when I bought a packaged version of Roxio Toast or Microsoft Office or iDVD back in 2001 and had a full expectation that every feature worked without having to call the developer to pay S&H to get them to mail me an updated version that works, I feel the same way about apps today. Ship 1.0 feature-complete. Work on 2.0 and charge me an upgrade fee. Don't ship software until its done. If someone else beats you to market, you ship later but better than them because you took the time to perfect things.
Subscriptions are not the way you afford to release '1.0s that are mere sketches' If your application isn't ready, don't ship it. I would greatly prefer to receive a new piece of software every 18 months that's feature complete and nearly bug-free (no software has 0 bugs).
The only reasonable expectation I have in the Internet age is that developers patch security bugs, bugs that would cause instability of your app and file corruption on my computer. If your app works without any security issues, don't update anything and save it for 2.0 when I have to pay another $50 to have the latest version. Imagine buying Roxio Toast and installing it and going to burn a DVR-RW and Roxio says 'Coming soon, DVD-R only. Write us an email with a $5 payment to unlock DVD-RW burning. 1.0 was just a mere sketch of what we plan on doing with this app over the coming year'. I own Pixelmator, Ulysses, 1 Password, DaisyDisk, AppZapper, Onyx, a better finder rename, Cyberduck, Transmission, Deliveries, iStat Menus, Img.urls, MacTracker, MarsEdit, Parallels, Reeder, Sequence, Skitch, Omni (focus, graffle), Tweetbot among dozens of other Mac apps. I use some of these apps once a month and some I use once a week.
I would prefer to pay $250 a year for all of them than $5 per month for each of these. An annual $5-$50 for major improvements to the app is worth it to me on these applications I rely on for some of my tasks.
I open Ulysses on a monthly basis when I'm working on something long-form that will eventually go into MS Word and be shared with colleagues in.docx format w/ fancy graphs. But the long-form writing, I'll do it in Ulysses.
At $5 a month, that means I'm spending $5 per document to draft out a long-form idea that will be edited elsewhere. If I didn't already own it, I wouldn't subscribe to that model.
I don't use Ulysses every day so my subscription isn't spread out in any meaningful way. It uses my iCloud drive for syncing and I've never emailed the company asking for support. There are no additional features I'm asking them for.
Subscriptions work in apps that I use every single day. I see Office 365 a valuable subscription.
Lightroom, something I use every 2 weeks, I bought outright. I did the math on my blog last week ('I looked at my Amazon History. I paid $144 for Lightroom 6 standalone in May of 2015. On a monthly basis, I’ve spent $5.50 a month to own Lightroom and if it’s ever updated to version 7, I could continue to run version 6 for the next decade as it suits my needs.
If I had spent $10 a month on Adobe Creative Cloud photographers, I’d have Photoshop which I never use and will have spent $260 for the same software. For some applications, a subscription makes sense. But Onyx which I run twice a year to clean up my Mac or A Better Finder Rename I open every 3 months to mass-rename some files or Sequence I use to assemble a Time Lapse once a year when I go on my road trip, if those developers decide to charge $1-$10 a month to use their application, they can piss off. Edit: 'But what about maintenance updates, coding the application to support new MacOS releases and keep it from crashing at launch and supporting the existing user base? These cost the developer money long after you've spent it' If a developer doesn't want to patch bugs in their application, I'll just buy another application in 2-3 years when yours stops launching. If you want to release 1.0 for $25 and then abandon it and not write another line of code, that's fine, there are a lot of applications on Mac that perform similar tasks. I don't owe you $5 a month when I can save my pennies and give them to someone else in 2-3 years when your app finally craps the bed.
Code gets stale, bugs pop up, OS upgrades break apps and competitors rise with cooler features. You can choose to remain competitive at a loss and accept an annualized major upgrade that causes all users to pay you for the cool new stuff or accept the money you got up front and never touch the code again In fact, there is a lot of mediocre Open source software out there that costs nothing to use. If every single Macintosh application is a subscription in 10 years, I'll write my own apps or go 100% open source and deal with the rawness and unpredictability of them. As a developer I can honestly say subscriptions are the easy way out. Essentially you've run out of ideas and cash flow has dropped so you hit back at those who originally purchased or continue to use your product. Never ever do I agree with this route. I just create a new app and move on, it's my fault for not being able to add new features to keep things fresh.
Unfortunately that's not how some other developers see it. They don't care about the end user. They just want the cash to keep coming in.
Most apps are half done anyway, that's just bad programming done on purpose.