When I need to make more research, or has many bits of information from different sources – then the Scrivener is the one I double-click on. :) When I need to plan my writing more, Scrivener has many nice features that helps organising my mind..

For my un-planned, flowing epic writing – Ulysses is fantastic.

And when I’m finished with the draft, I export to Pages and make the final editing and layout thing there and then off to the print shop…

I’d actually love to see some integration possibilities between the two. I love using Ulysses to burn through long pieces of text, and I love using Scrivener to manipulate, annotate and prep that text. I’d be in Heaven if Ulysses could export to Scrivener format or Scrivener could import from Ulysses (and vice versa).

But, there are workarounds for that. Just chalk me up to another writer who loves both programs and uses them both all the time.

1. People who like creative writing apps tend to like both Scrivener AND Ulysses, and we all know writers usually have a tough time making decisions. ;-) And

2. I for one use both applications: Ulysses for my blogging needs (semantic text editing + markdown export is just amazing when exporting to the web), and Scrivener for the longer projects (where having a more “rigid” hierarchy is pretty helpful).

In any case, I find it very cool that Keith and Marcus can sincerely appreciate each other’s work! Cheers to you both.

I’ve written tens of thousands of words with both programs, but for the past year I’ve defaulted to Ulysses. I like the clean icon-less interface, and I found there were a few things in Scrivener, like the Research binder and some of the Inspector pane views, that I didn’t need but couldn’t get out of the way. I also have to export to Windows-readable text, something that Ulysses does and Scrivener doesn’t.

I suspect my loyalties will shift again when Scrivener 2.0 comes out. The two-way jump from editor to comments and back again is very attractive, among other things. But I’ll be keeping a firm eye on Ulysses, ready to make the jump back should it leapfrog Scrivener. It is a beautifully-crafted piece of software, and the innovation poured into it has changed the nature of writing on the computer. I believe it was pricing that initially allowed it to be overtaken in the popularity stakes, but the Soulmen may disagree. Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing where Ulysses goes next.

As MuppetGate (nice name!) says, I think a good number of people have licences for both our programs, too. In fact our new Collections feature grew out of a discussion on our forums about the relative merits of our two programs and so, although mainly implemented to obviate the need for “clones” in Scriv’s binder (a common request), undeniably owes a debt to Ulysses’ “Groups & Collections” feature. I may as well acknowledge that one publicly on your blog right now!

Anyway, thanks again!

All the best,
Keith
(Scrivener dev)