Following your sponsorship of Daring Fireball's RSS feed, I recently purchased Ulysses - on October 31, 2009. I downloaded the latest version and registered the copy, watched bits and pieces of introductory videos, read the important sections of the manual, and was pretty convinced that I had, at long last, found a piece of software to help me keep track of different article drafts for my blog. **So far, so good.**

Today I began using Ulysses for good - after all, Led Zeppelin had released "Stairway to Heaven" on this day 38 years ago, so why not? I spent 9 delightful hours with the programme, developing ideas for articles, writing two drafts - *an entirely pleasant experience.*

At the very beginning, I save my new project, give it a sweet and happy name, save my articles in between out of habit, make sure that the manual is right about the auto-save and automatic backup features at closing and opening. I am confident that this is entirely true:

> "Your project state is always up-to-date. When you close and reopen Ulysses, the project will be exactly the same as before. The same tabs will be open and all documents will be restored."

You will understand how surprised I was to find, when re-opening Ulysses a few hours later to finalise and publish one of my articles, well, nothing. **An empty project, not a single article, not a single word.** Convinced that an empty project had been opened, I first navigate to where I had saved my project, to find an empty project. Nothing of what I had done since saving the project once in the very beginning of an entire creative and productive day had been saved. So I navigate to the backup folder, convinced that with the closing of the programme a backup of my project had been made as the manual clearly states. Again, I find nothing but an empty project.

And I can reliably reproduce this fatal error: I have created numerous test projects, saved them at the beginning with a unique name, created several documents, saved these documents within the project, then closed the programme - and no, most unfortunately, "when you close and reopen Ulysses, the project will", alas, not "be exactly the same as before." No backup is created, and the programme returns me to the naked project at the very beginning of everything, after the first innocent and hopeful save.

**Surely this is not intended?**

I run a fully registered copy of Ulysses 2.0.3 on Snow Leopard 10.6.1.

M,

**Thanks a million** for taking the time to respond.

So far, I have had the luck to only experience similar things with Microsoft Word, to which I have grown oblivious over time o:)

The disaster occurred on my Macbook, and nope, I don't have Time Machine running on the little machine (I use SuperDuper regularly). I have just come out of testing my disk, and everything seems to be fine with the hardware. Moreover, I can reproduce the problem on my iMac, a brand-new machine with a completely fresh install - no mirroring or transfer of personal settings involved.

All still *seems to be* pointing at the erroneous implementation of basic functionality, and I am curious to find out myself what the story is!

Cheers,
sospetto

Sospetto,
this is too bad. I hope there will be a simple explanation for what happens on your machine. It works excellent here on my MacBook Pro with the same configuration.
Sorry I could not be of assistance,
M

Marcus, I did what you suggested, but there is indeed nothing inside the packages - neither the original project nor the backup. Weird, all this, weird.

I am beginning to suspect that the Deutsche Bahn has their hands in this: I travelled from Basel to Berlin while using Ulysses... You never know.

Yip: nothing as in "completely empty, size of the project file below 300 KB" - and yes, sounds very strange, is very strange.

*The silver lining:* on both machines this problem does not occur with a freshly created user. What next?

It's got nothing to do with permissions, it seems, and everything to do with the use of recent items - a dependancy and connection which escapes me.

I had completely disabled the use of Recent Items Menus (via Tinkertool) - so not only set the number of recent items in system preferences to 0, but actually completely disabled the whole thing. It is, as far as I am aware, not exactly uncommon for users to disable this feature for their privacy. How can the project-saving of Ulysses be dependent on that?

As soon as I enabled recent items, the programme saves projects as intended. This also explains why new user accounts had no problem - the recent items settings are user-related, and new user accounts come, of course, with the standard setting enabled.

I can't help it, but to me this seems like a big fat bug...

Yip, after reenabling recent items with Tinkertool, everything works as intended - and after disabling recent items again, the erroneous behaviour reappears. Tried several times on both machines, works reliably and scaringly well.

Good to know that 2.1 will fix this - I am looking forward to the next release, very much indeed so!

You've got mail :)