We just finished a brand-new teaser for Ulysses, which we didn’t want to hold back from you. It’ll be part of a minor restructuring of the Ulysses webpage. Whether you want a quick tour of the interface or want to learn more about Ulysses’ core features, just go ahead and watch it.

This does not sound too promising, I guess, but let me explain. We are having major technical and/or legal problems. All of Ulysses can easily be realized on the iPhone — except one part: Ulysses’ heart. Semantic text editing.

More precisely, the whole problem resolves around on single issue: Displaying styled text while editing it. We need this ability to display the styles, which is the core of our concept. Everything builds on top of it. Apple greatly improved in the iPhone OS 3.2 on what is possible for text editing, however there are still major parts missing. Currently, we see two ways we could do the coloring:

1) The hacky way: We observed that the text editing view in iPhone OS is actually a web view. A web view which edits and displays HTML. HTML which we can get access to. Access we can use to modify the structure and styling and hence add colors, etc.
The Problem: Private API. Each of the steps I just described is private API. And you know what that means. Bummer.

2) The legal way: New to iPhone OS 3.2 is an advanced text rendering engine, CoreText. This does nothing but display text, but it does it well. And there is the ability to directly grab the keyboard input.
The Problem: All the rest. We would basically have to re-write ALL user interaction! Text selection, text loupe, copy and paste, spell checking, etc. All these things are missing. Even worse, while we could eventually implement all of these, we will never be as sophisticated as Apple. I bet they used a couple of man-years to implement this stuff, no power we have. Ulysses would always feel like an alien on the iPad. If you know the level of quality we require from our products, you know that we’d never go for such a solution.

And this is the mess we are in. We have – right now – an implemented working version of the first approach. We also have an implementation of the second one – except of all the nice user interaction you’d naturally expect. I will be going to WWDC next week and talk to some guys at Apple. I hope they will have good news for me, but I’m afraid they won’t.

We would sooo love to do Ulysses on the iPad. 1) is that Apple would not let us, 2) is too much effort for producing average results. We know no other way. Let us hear what you think! We’d like to discuss this issue with you!

The Soulmen

To get the Web Export up and running, download it here. Every kind of feedback is very welcome — either via e-mail, in our forum or in our bug tracker.

Götz

As you probably noticed, this blog has been pretty quiet lately. The last few months have been pretty busy for us Soulmen, some of us had to take some time off from Ulysses. Nonetheless, development of Ulysses is now going ahead at full speed and we’ll have a public beta of Ulysses’ sparkling new Web Export ready soon. This exporter has taken us quite a while, but we wanted to make it just perfect for all your blogging and publishing needs. Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Götz

• Ulysses – 35.99
• Ulysses edu – 27.99
• Ulysses core – 19.99

That’s it, nothing else to add.
Oh, well… Merry Christmas everybody. :)

Update: The christmas sale is over. Happy New Year everybody!

Have a nice weekend, as so will I!
Max

recently it has been hard to miss that we are developing Ulysses Mobile. There have been some pictures and videos around. This might have wetted your teeth… But now we want you to get your hands on the nearly finished version — as an exclusive beta tester!

So what do you need?

• An iPhone or an iPod touch with at least OS 3.0
• Some good use for an semantic text editor on the go
• A little tolerance to bugs and quirks.
• Warmheartedness and stuff …

Wanna participate? Just send your application to ulysses@the-soulmen.com, and make sure to include some information about the type of device (iPhone/iPod) and the installed system. We have not yet decided how many people will participate, nor do we know when we’ll start exactly, but it might still happen this week :)

Update: Wow, the response was overwhelming! We do now have enough beta testers for Ulysses Mobile. Thank you to everyone who applied!

Have fun,

Max

Here’s what we got so far, in no chronological order: Paragraph styles, inline styles, user-definable start- and end tags, user-selectable font colors, add/edit/rename/remove styles via project prefs, project-specific style settings (YAY!), styling while typing, styling when editing.

Here’s what you’ll get with 1.0: All of the above plus highlighting with user-selectable color, selection styling (select text and apply style), full style editing from within the editor.

Max really pulled it off. Not much more to add.

Today I was skimming through a bunch of iPhone mockups on my desktop and rediscovered some old app concepts. They’re mostly minimal in nature, and if we had the time and resources we would just code them up and try to release them on the App Store for free.

Well, we have neither, so I decided to share some of these ideas on this blog rather than trying to catch a new coder and convince him to create non-profit two-minute distractions. ;)

So here I go, first up: The Good Vibe.

Concept:
The main idea is an app that you launch when in a hotel room or before going to bed or during an expo in a strange town in the middle of nowhere. You launch the app and can sort of “see” the current vibe of the city you’re in, or check the current vibe of your hometown.
You can also leave a message right where you are, such as “feeling lonely” or “love you all”, effectively tuning the vibe of your location.
It’s a bit like walking the streets at night. Cars passing by, people rushing to get home. A small nod or a smile from a passer-by can make all the difference; about the way you feel — about the city, about your current situation, any situation.
That’s what the app is meant to do: Make you feel good, sort of. Connected. Not alone. At least put a smile on your face. If only for a second.

Operation:
The app collects your geo location and presents you with a view of anonymous short text messages written by users in your vicinity. At a timed interval, one of the messages gets highlighted and enlarged, then another one, and another one and so on.
There’s not much interaction here — you just see a bunch of messages and a single one highlighted. You just watch as messages fly by.
You won’t be able to swipe over the view and activate other messages or such. But you will be able to send your own messages. These will be added to the stream of your current loc, so other users can read them.

Ratings:
There’s a “negative” rating option when sending messages.
There’s also a “negative” rating option somehow attached to each highlighted message. This might be a simple “-” button or a top-to-bottom swipe gesture (especially if we want to fine grain the rating).
The ratings have no effect on the messages’ display or such, but rather on the city the rated messages were sent from.

Effects of Rating (1):
Ratings are sent to the server and collected in order to define the “vibe” a city is in. Unrated messages are counted as “positive”, while negative ratings are counted as such. The +/- ratio defines the city’s current vibe.

Effects of Rating (2):
The background color of the messages view changes depending on the city’s vibe. A positive city might be vibrantly colored and even have a slightly pulsating background, while a more negative city displays a darker message view.
A double-tap or such will open a world map which somehow shows the current vibe of select cities. You’ll be able to check out the vibe of all cities, but you can only activate the message view in two core locations: Your current loc, and your hometown.
The idea is to create a somewhat strong connection between you, your current location, and other users in that location. Every message you send has an effect on the vibe of your location. So even more than just checking out the “vibe”, it’s about creating a vibe. You’re part of the city, so to say.

Features:
Send short messages to a server.
Receive short messages based on geo location.
Option to rate single messages as “negative”.
Map of world with select cities showing “vibe” (based on negative ratings).

How to:
When the user connects to the server, we check the geo loc. We then simply use a very fuzzy method of finding messages in the vacinity. If he’s the only user within reach, we simply use a wider radius or the first larger user base.
We then push a fixed amount of messages to the device, let’s say 30 to 50. These messages contain the amount of positive/negative messages based on the loc’s computed vibe.
The messages get displayed in a very minimal style to create some sort of zen-effect.

Message selection:
Depending on how active the user’s area is, we might have trouble finding enough messages to display. So we’ll need methods to compensate for inactive areas. These methods may include a smaller selection of messages (only show 10 if the area is very inactive) and/or a wide scan radius in both geo loc and timeline. E.g., we could simply check if it’s the user’s first time around and then push the first 20 messages instead of the latest, then simply include 10 arbitrary NEW messages from all over the world.
So even if the user checks the app in a location where nobody has ever left a message, he will get 30 messages, most likely in the correct language, and in the current vibe, which will always be “good” since there’s no negative input from there and so we only push good (or rather: neutral) ones.

Infrastructure:
I don’t know nothing about server load, latency, geo location troubles and the like. I don’t even know how to get the data into a database, let alone how to structure it in order to efficiently push 30 short messages to what might be 10.000 simultaneous connection attempts.
I simply don’t know how to pull this off. :)

Closing comment:
I think this might be fun, if only for a few months or so. I think that the social aspect might take off, especially with cities being labeld as having a good/bad vibe. Just imagine having Rome displayed in devilish red while London gets the love…
However, this might be a complete failure, with only 10 users active and all of them posting links to illegal downloads.
Given our current size an structure, we can’t even give this thing a shot, so we’ll leave it as is and probably just bury it.

And that’s it. :)

I’d still love to see this materialized somehow, so if anybody is reading this and wants to pick it up — feel free to do so.

• Removed additional Edit menu
• Crashes during opening projects on 10.4
  [Ed: just to be clear... we fixed that]
• Fixed Portuguese, Italian Localization
• Pasting text to console mode notes window no longer screws colors
• Fixed a bug which causes a hang during a LaTeX export, if a document ends with a footnote mark.
• Fixed a bug in the LaTeX exporter which exported a footnote, even if the footnote mark is deleted by another
• Layout glitches when changing display in info panel
  [Ed: same here]
• Hang when clearing styles in a empty document
  [Ed: and here]
• Now only shows Trial expiry sheet once

Note: The edit menu on pre Snow Leopard (10.6) systems will show several greyed-out items, such as “Transformations”. These are exclusive to Snow Leopard, so there’s nothing to worry about. We tried to hide these from 10.5 and below, but it’s not worth the hassle, really.

So, there you have it. The update should be available as you read this via integrated update greateness.

2.0.3 will be the last update to Ulysses 2.0, unless we really screwed up something. The next release will already be 2.1, which will offer nothing new in terms of editing features, but will focus on data security, backup handling, as well as management of your projects. Oh, and iPhone/iPod touch syncing, of course.

Have fun!