Ulysses 17 — The Summer Release

We have just released Ulysses 17 to both the App Store and the Mac App Store. The update improves the app in various areas, and I will quickly touch on a couple of them here. As always, you should visit our version history to get a full list of changes. Don’t forget to update, though.

Keywords

We now have a keyword manager on iOS. You can rename and merge existing keywords, see all your keywords in one place, and batch-color them, just as you can on macOS. We are also introducing favorite keywords, which are available on both platforms. Favorite keywords offer quicker access to, well, your favorite keywords when assigning… keywords.

Image Captions

Image previews in the editor will now show captions, if available. This was a much-requested feature, and we’re very happy with how it turned out. It’s a small and subtle addition, but very effective, since captions are even visible on empty images (great for working with placeholders). As a bonus, we now support image captions when exporting to PDF, DOCX and RTF.

New Export Styles

We have also added four new export styles for PDF and DOCX. Each style is built for a specific purpose, and thus modeled after a common template: Business is geared towards reports and strategy papers, and Academica is meant for lecture notes. Review was built for on-paper/print-out editing, and Manuscript uses the U.S. layout standards for submitting literary works to publishers. As is always the case with export styles – they only make sense with suitable content. We’d be glad to hear back from you, if you are using the new styles, and how well they fit your purpose.

iPad Fullscreen Mode

One of the biggest changes of this release is specific to iPad: A new fullscreen mode. For years now we have experimented with various ways to reduce clutter in the editor, be smart about it, hide toolbars on-the-fly and whatnot. Ulysses 17 introduces a dedicated fullscreen mode on iPad, a real switch, with nothing else on screen but the editor. We even go as far as hiding the shortcut row when using a hardware keyboard. It’s a completely new experience, really.

Coming Up: Catalina, iOS and iPadOS

Before I let you loose, one final word about upcoming OS versions. Ulysses 17 is released today, and it is released for today. We are hard at work to make Ulysses a good citizen of Apple’s new systems. Once Apple ships these, Ulysses will be ready, most likely sporting version 18. We will have news on this in the coming week.

Now go and grab that update!

Have fun.