Based in Leipzig, Germany, The Soulmen is a company made up of a small team of people who develop exclusively for Apple devices. One of the products the company develops is called Ulysses. Ulysses is a text editor that’s available on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
The company has released version 2.6 which adds the ability to publish posts to WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress sites, and Medium. Thanks to the free 10 hour demo that’s available, I was able to install and test it on my Macbook Pro.
The connection process is straightforward. Simply provide the URL, username, and password.
Once connected, users can publish posts directly or save them as drafts in WordPress.
In addition to publishing posts, users can also:
- Add an unlimited number of sites
- Schedule posts
- Set categories, tags, excerpts, and featured images
- Apply a post format
- Configure the post slug and title link
- Publish as HTML or Markdown
- Set post-publishing actions. For example, opening the post in the WordPress editor after it’s published.
My Experience Using Ulysses
After testing Ulysses for a few hours, I can say that it won’t replace the WordPress desktop application I use. Writing a post in Markdown and then exporting it to WordPress as HTML is not a workflow I particularly enjoy. Also, the editor in Ulysses does not have oEmbed support which is a killer feature in the WordPress editor.
I enjoy the visual editor in the WordPress desktop application and WordPress itself. Only when I use other editors do I realize how many features I take for granted with oEmbed being the best example.
What Ulysses excels at is providing a clean interface where the words take center stage. While it’s not for me, I can see it being useful for those who enjoy writing content in Markdown and who want a truly distraction-free writing experience.