Manton Reece on Ulysses Mobile:

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.

Manton is frustrated about the lack of Dropbox support in Ulysses Mobile and he is expressing a common complaint and concern I hear from people about the app. The question I am asked is how I handle this, how I am ok with it, how I use my text in other apps…

My answer is simple: I never need it. Anything I put in Ulysses I never need to access from another app — a point even stronger now that there is a solid iPhone version as well. There’s just no need for it. And should I ever need to get my stuff out, it is a pretty easy export from the Mac app.

I get why people are leery of this, I really do, but both Ulysses and iCloud have never given me issues. Is my stuff stuck in a proprietary bundle? Sure, for the moment. Does it really matter in practice? Not at all.

The second question that I get a lot about Ulysses is if you can choose not to hide the URLs when you create a link. Ulysses prettifies the Markdown by putting a box around the linked text. The answer is: no, you have to live with that.

I get it too, at first it was off putting to me, but now I can’t imagine using an app that doesn’t make the URLs look nice. This isn’t a plain text writing app, this is a sane text writing app. Pretty URLs look pretty and aren’t distracting — give it a try and you might like it.

That’s what I tend to tell everyone: just try it and I bet you won’t go back.