After I blogged about Ulysses for Mac, a couple people told me that an iPad version was coming soon and that it was great. That new version shipped this week. I put down $20 immediately even before reading the positive MacStories review by David Chartier.
Unfortunately I can’t use it much because it has no native Dropbox support. For a market that has literally many dozens of Dropbox text editors, I didn’t consider that Ulysses would ship without something so integral to my writing workflow.
(The Mac version doesn’t have this problem because of the concept of “External Folders”. I simply add my Dropbox notes folder to Ulysses on my Mac and everything syncs.)
Last month I wrote a post called iCloud is too opaque, in which I made an argument against having important text files and photos synced to a backend that allows no visibility when things go wrong, and no compatibility with other apps. Ulysses for iOS falls into this trap. Its use of iCloud is private to the app, unlike iCloud Drive or Dropbox which are accessible from other apps.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. The FAQ for Ulysses spends considerable space trying to explain away their lack of Dropbox support, even attempting to pin the issue on Dropbox instead of Ulysses itself.
The Soulmen, makers of Ulysses, are talented designers and developers, and I’m typing this in Ulysses for Mac because their app has a great mix of features and attention to detail. I respect that they’ve grown the company to 11 people already. But closed syncing solutions aren’t a good choice for exclusivity. Having cross-platform syncing across competing Twitter apps is why I created Tweet Marker, so you can be sure I want the same for my text documents.
