The Soulmen have just posted Ulysses III to the Mac App Store. It brings Daedalus-style document management (similar to Scrivener) to a Markdown (and Textile) editor that’s pretty special.
The editor itself uses inline highlighting for things like footnotes, comments, links and image attachments (which can be dragged and dropped). In reality, these are being stored as plain text, but displayed in a way that is reminiscent of a word processor. Bold and italics are shown styled as well. There are shortcut keys for just about every operation.
It’s also gorgeous. There are several editing modes, including distraction free and full-screen modes, dark and light backgrounds and an iOS-style cursor. There are three collapsible panes for stacks, sheets and editing. Five small buttons in the toolbar are the extent of the “chrome,” allowing for a very elegant interface.
Documents are stored as stacks of sheets, and you can select and edit multiple sheets at once. It uses iCloud and syncs with Daedalus, but you can import external sources, too. It becomes both an editor and a document manager.
Documents can be navigated by headers, and you can add bookmarks and star sheets as favorites. You can also add notes to sheets and attach images as reference items. Ulysses III includes a full character/word count with reading time estimates.
You can export your documents to RTF, PDF, TXT or HTML. In the near future — when the next version of Marked is officially released — integration with Marked will be tight.
If you’re looking for a new Markdown editor, Ulysses III is truly worth checking out. For the next week it’s priced at $19.99 US, and it will be $39.99 US after that. Daedalus Touch is also on sale for the week at just $0.99 US.
