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Why I Love Ulysses
I want to start this post off by saying that I love Ulysses. It is an awesome app for writing and does a great job of getting out of the way and letting you focus on the words. I love it so much that I wanted to try and make it my only notes app.
It has features like Typewriter Mode, which I was using when I took the screenshot above. You can see how it highlights exactly what I am typing at the moment while letting me see the context of the current paragraph. And it allows me to place the typing line in a fixed position towards the bottom of my screen on my big 27” iMac display. This helps with reducing neck fatigue for me (I wear transition glasses). All of these settings are options that you can choose from, so you can customize your experience to what works best for you.
I can quickly get to my sheets or my groups if I needed to by simply pressing the keyboard shortcuts of ⌘1 for the Groups sidebar or ⌘2 for the sheets list, but having a screen that is empty except my thoughts and words is so calming and helps me focus.
I foresee this being my main writing app for a long time to come. Ulysses is simple and elegant for writing words. I can even give myself trackable writing goals within it if I wanted to (e.g., write 3,000 words per week, etc.).
Why Ulysses Can’t Be My Only Notes App
Now that I have explained why I love Ulysses and that I am not leaving it, I feel the need to explain why it can’t be more than what it is to me. Maybe it’s how my mind works, or how I choose to use notes applications, but sometimes I need to be able to see richer formatting on my text while I am writing my notes, and I also need inline pictures and clickable hyperlinks. Ulysses doesn’t work like this.
I can provide two different examples around this:
- For my job as a manager, I have one-on-one (1:1) meetings with the people that work for me. I keep one running note per person and keep adding to it towards the top of the note. Because of this, I need an easy to see visual divider between entry points so I can quickly navigate between past meetings. I also have areas at the top of the note with action items for the other person and myself. I like to use checkboxes for these, so I know what is open and still needs to be worked on versus what is already completed. Even if I use an external task management app (I use Things 3), it is nice to have a concise view of what needed to get done and cover those things quickly on our weekly meetings. I continuously refresh this list throughout our meetings as jobs get completed, and we discuss them, so it doesn’t ever build up too long. I also have other notes, outside of my 1:1 note, for tracking Marketing campaigns, SME duties, etc. I link to these additional notes inside the 1:1 note so I can click on it, have it open quickly, cover what we need, and close that external note and move on.
- There are other times where I need to include screenshots or pictures around some thought process or procedure I am trying to complete. My latest requirement was the need (want) to blow away my iMac Pro and perform a clean install to start over from scratch (more on this later). I put together a task list of things I needed to verify or do before blowing away my machine. I also decided it would be easier to take screenshots of the applications I had installed, instead of typing out a list, so I could easily remember what I might need to reinstall, as well as decide what I no longer wanted/needed.
For the first instance, Bear Notes provides nicely formatted visual headers and line breaks, but I can achieve these with simple Markdown formatting. Meaning, just like in Ulysses, I don’t need to stop what I’m typing to highlight things and apply formatting. I use the special characters, and Bear Notes applies the visual formatting for me. This helps me quickly scan the note and jump to the area I am looking for.
One could argue that Markdown formatting itself can provide these visual indicators, and maybe that is good enough for some. It’s not for me in this use case.
Also, active clickable hyperlinks are essential for me. While you can create links within Ulysses, there doesn’t seem to be a way to click on those links to jump to them quickly. Also, and maybe more importantly, there doesn’t appear to be any way to link to different “sheets” (notes) within Ulysses. I swore Ulysses had an x-callback-URL scheme, but if it does, it’s not apparent how to make that work.
In Bear Notes, there are two different ways to link to other notes:
- You can simply type “[[“ followed by the title of the note, and it automatically brings up a list of notes that match your text string to choose the one you need. You can then click on this link to open the note in a separate window… meaning, you have not navigated away from the note you are using.
- To link to a Bear note outside of the Bear application, you can right-click on a note and choose “Copy Link To Note” to get the x-callback-URL for that note. Using that link anywhere, even on iOS, will open the Bear application to that specific note. I often use this in Things when I need more info or attachments since Things doesn’t allow attachments, and the notes section isn’t the best place to have a lot of text.
If Ulysses is capable of these things, the method to get it to work escapes me. If anyone knows how to make this work, please share in the comments.
For the second instance, while Ulysses is capable of adding images into a sheet, the images are grayed out and made smaller. This is perfectly fine for blogging or writing a book, but it’s not useful as a note app in and of itself. My point is, when writing for a blog or book, the intent is to publish that work externally. In doing so, the final work is appropriately formatted and “pretty” with full-size color images displayed. But it doesn’t need to be “pretty” while you are spilling the words onto the keyboard/screen.
For checkboxes or short task lists, Ulysses does not seem to have this capability at all. In fact, Ulysses doesn’t support many Markdown styles (it appears to use a modified subset of Markdown XL). If you look at Ulysses as an app designed for writing alone, the limited formatting makes complete sense. But, this means it isn’t right for me for other note-taking duties. While I could probably make it work, why should I settle?
Keep It?
In my quest to both find the right tools for me, as well as trying to minimize how many tools I am using, I will be giving Keep It a shot at being this other note app for instances where I need better formatting and inline images.
I currently use Keep It as my longer-term research collection. When I find content on the web that I want to keep long-term, I create an offline archive of it in Keep It. The offline file is either as a single-page PDF, so I can highlight things inside it, or a web-archive if the formatting of a PDF doesn’t work right (you can’t highlight text in a web-archive… If you could I would mainly use this method).
I am also, just in the past week, attempting to use Keep It for my “read later” content area instead of Pocket. I am currently working on a more extensive post talking about Keep It versus Pocket and how I am using this, so I will leave most of the details to that post. I am honestly still trying to navigate all of that, so my thought process isn’t finished yet. Hopefully, I will have it figured out before next week, but no promises. The quick summary, though, is that I created a folder in Keep It labeled “_Inbox” (the underscore is simply to have this folder at the top of my folder list) that I am dumping things in that need review. When I find stuff that I want to read later (because I just don’t have the time at that moment), I make a quick decision: Do I know I want this long-term? If so, I save for offline while keeping it in the inbox folder to make sure the formatting looks right. If I am not sure if I want to keep it long-term, I simply save it as a link (not offline) because this is quicker. I then need to review my inbox folder throughout the week to filter stuff further.
I used to (kind of still do) fall into this habit of opening tabs in my browser of things I wanted to read at some point and leave them open, so I didn’t forget. At times I may have had more than 50 tabs open in my browser!! I did this because I wasn’t in the habit of opening Pocket and reading through stuff, so I would either forget to or decide not to send things to Pocket. When I was trying to find a browser tab with something I was actively using/working-on, it took me forever to find it in all of the noise of all my open tabs. That’s when I realized I needed a better method. Because I was in the midst of trying to switch everything to Keep It instead of Pocket, I came up with this workflow. Again, I will explain this more in-depth in my post on Keep It versus Pocket.
Bear Notes For Now
One of the reasons why I chose to start using Bear was because of its simplicity and beautiful user interface. I really do enjoy using the app. I suppose one could also argue that I could use Bear as my main notes app and even for all my writing. However, Bear, unlike Ulysses, does not have an integrated way to publish to my blog. And I do still love Ulysses for that writing duty.
While I will be giving Keep It a chance at this note-taking use case, I have a feeling I will stick with Bear for those use cases I mentioned.
Circling Back
I bet you thought I forgot about explaining why I would want to rebuild my iMac Pro from scratch… well, I didn’t!
When I got my iMac Pro, I was moving away from my laptop, which was a 2016 era 15” MacBook Pro with TouchBar, 16GB of RAM, 2TB PCIe SSD, and discrete GPU. I wrote a post about it on my photography blog titled, Going Immobile {get the proper title and link}. To get up and running as quickly as possible with all my apps and custom settings, etc., I decided to “migrate” from my laptop.
I had been using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to backup/clone my laptop daily to an external USB drive (you can read more about that here) {link to my post on backing up the cloud}, so I was able to connect that drive and point to it for the data transfer.
While that did get me up and running quickly as if nothing had changed, it also brought along all of the crap and cruft that had built-up on it over the years. I think I may have used the same process on that 15” MacBook Pro from my previous MacBook Pro! So there were little oddities that would rear their head and bug me occasionally.
More recently, I have been enjoying using the Apple Books app (formerly iBooks) and realized that books were not syncing across all my devices. They were from my iPhone to my iPad, but not to/from my iMac. This meant that things I added on my iMac were not ever showing up on my iDevices and vice versa. I have been using Books as a place to store and read many PDFs that I use for reference and reading, so this was becoming more bothersome.
There were many more things than just Books not syncing correctly, but I guess this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. So, I decided it was time to start over from scratch. This process used to be much more difficult and kind of nerve-racking… but this time was super easy and painless. Enter iCloud Drive.
iCloud Drive Makes Life Easy
iCloud Drive is so integrated into macOS and iOS these days that it feels completely natural and seamless. It is by no means perfect or without fault, but the benefits far outweigh any drawbacks.
I used to use Dropbox for all my “user-data” (i.e., anything that was part of the operating system or installed applications), but I recently migrated all my data off Dropbox into iCloud (for personal) and OneDrive (for work) and stopped paying for Dropbox. It’s not that I no longer like Dropbox or have a problem with them as a company, but I already used iCloud for all of my photo data and was paying for 2TB of iCloud storage that I wasn’t using completely. I also have OneDrive through my employer, and therefore it made sense to store my work files on the cloud storage they provided.
In the past, when I would rebuild a computer, I would have to go download, install, and then wait for Dropbox to sync much of my data to be able to use or install a bunch of the apps I use. With iCloud Drive being part of, and integrated into, the operating system, this all happens automatically when I first create my user and link it to my Apple ID. Super simple, easy, and quick syncing. iCloud also does well at only synchronizing the data you need, when you need it, and offloads things you are not using to free up disk space. It does all of this seamlessly behind the scenes. The result is that you never have to think about it or mess with it. While Dropbox can do selective sync and dynamic sync, it never felt as seamless as iCloud does.
At any rate, I simply made sure that all my data was in iCloud, that I had a list of all of the applications I use (I took screenshots of my launchpads for this to make it quick and easy) and only had to check a few different things to verify that I was good to format my internal storage. Another factor that reduced my stress was that I use CCC to clone my internal storage, so I knew I had a full clone of all my data and setting “just in case.”
The install of the operating system went super fast compared to what I remember in the old days. I don’t think it took more than 30 mins before I was creating my user account to log in! That is because the internal storage on my iMac Pro is insanely fast, like all modern-day Apple computers. PCIe SSD is a complete game-changer with read & write speeds of over 2.5GB/s!
I was also able to download very quickly and install & configure (my internet is through Verizon FiOS with fiber run to the side of my house and Gigabit speeds both up and down). In many cases, I merely had to point to the data in iCloud, or, like Adobe Lightroom and a few other apps, they have proprietary cloud storage for my data. I also have made a conscious decision to try and use applications that are cross-device capable and use iCloud as their storage/sync platform.
I started this whole process at 5:30’ish PM on Thursday and was pretty much all done, including installing and customizing all my applications, by 11 PM that same night. This process used to be a whole day affair, so I was pretty stoked that it all worked out so quickly. Also, my plan worked, as everything is working as it is supposed to now.
P.S. — When I decided to start this process on Thursday at 5:30 PM, I fully expected not to be able to be back up and running until some time on Saturday, since I still had a job to do all Friday. I could use my 11” iPad Pro to do almost 100% of what I do and always had my work laptop as a failsafe if I needed a “real” computer. So I was ecstatic that it all worked out so quickly!
