I left a comment in response to a note from the Ulysses guys on my “dream Markdown editor” piece. It just said “I want a beta.” They let me know they heard me by publishing the quote on their devblog. Today, they gave me a beta, and a hilarious T-shirt:
I’m allowed to talk about Ulysses 3, at least the features included in the private beta. I’ll share some more thoughts after I play with it for a while, but I can tell you from the demo that it’s very cool. A re-thinking of plain text editing that incorporates some features from Daedalus touch. Formatted text is treated by the editor as objects, so you don’t see the markup for things like links and images in the text, keeping it clean and simple, but you can copy it out as Markdown, HTML or text with just a click. It works with Markdown, Textile and other variants, including “Souldown,” The Soulmen’s own markup syntax. Basically, whatever markup you want to use just works, and–because it’s storing your work as objects–you can easily swap between modes and syntaxes.
The idea of documents and projects is gone. You can still make a project as complicated as you like, but the entire idea of “saving” files and projects can be history if you want it to. If you’ve used Daedalus (and I recommend trying it), you’re familiar with the concept.
Time will tell how this all comes out, but I’m really excited about what’s being forged here.
