At work, we are Lean practitioners (I’m a Green Belt). One of the tenets of Lean is Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA). I’m a big fan of the saying: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. PDSA is a way of admitting your first try to get something done may not be (and likely won’t be) the correct path. In PSDA, you plan the work, do the work, study the results, and then act upon any changes. Rinse, lather, and repeat as necessary.
As a workflow geek, I’m constantly looking at my own workflows and seeing what works and doesn’t[1]. As part of my writing workflow, I’m examining Ulysses’s place in my workflow. I’m very happy with the app, but I also want to make sure that perhaps there isn’t a better method to handle my writing. So, I’m writing this post in 1Writer instead. In Ulysses, all of my scrivenings reside in one large repository. I’ve never experienced any sync issues – or heard of anyone experience in them – but I have a deep-seated nervousness about this. That said, I use Ulysses on both macOS[2] and iOS, it’s nice having a common toolset between the two. Ulysses on the Mac works exactly the same as Ulysses on my iPad. I don’t have a Markdown editor on the Mac I like as much as 1Writer on the iPad. I use footnotes extensively in my writing, and I like that both Ulysses and 1Writer handle the formatting painlessly.
I’m also working on a collection of essays that I may publish into a book later this year. Ulysses is great at this sort of thing. What I may prefer is to have each essay sit as its own text file in Dropbox and decide which ones make the cut for publication. Those will get sent to Ulysses for compilation.
Scrivener is an interesting choice for fiction. I don’t need my fiction to be in Markdown. It’s not going to end up on the web. Sometimes, writing in rich text can help. Matt Gemmell has a long post here, where he talks about using Scrivener and Ulysses on the iPad. He posits that writing in Markdown vs. rich text is something we as writers should just get over. In the end, he choose Ulysses because it supports an all-in on the iPad lifestyle better than Scrivener. I agree with him on that point. Scrivener for iOS is a perfectly fine editor, but its compilation and exporting tools are lacking. It doesn’t support ePub. The <$titles> variable to insert the document title into the export doesn’t work on the iPad. It assumes you’re ok with doing that sort of heavy lifting on your Mac. Scrivener for iOS is definitely more of a companion tool. I’m also not completely sure how often it’s really saving the files. You can set it to sync to Dropbox on project close. It just seems ripe for some sort of an error to make my life miserable. Ulysses, on the other hand, is constantly saving and syncing back to iCloud.
So, where did this PDSA lead me?
For my blog writing, I’m sticking with Ulysses. The posting interface is cleaner, and I like how it handles the footnotes and links a tad batter. For my long-form writing I’m still leaning towards keeping it Ulysses, but I’ll be testing out Scrivner a little more. I really want to try breaking the Dropbox sync before I truly trust it. My essays, that can sit on their own and have minimal formatting I will keep in a .txt file I can edit in 1Writer on iOS and Byword on the Mac.
So, after all that examining, I still ended up back at the beginning anyway.
Mark Crump 