Ulysses III vs Notebooks

A few themes are baked in and a big selection of user-contributed styles to choose from are available on the Ulysses Style Exchange.

Ulysses has a clean, unobtrusive, easy to overview interface that allows focusing on writing. By default it's split up in 3 panes with sidebar, sheet pane and content pane from left to right. Unnecessary panes can be hidden.

Markdown formatting can be applied from the right-click menu, with keyboard shortcuts or from an optional markup bar. Necessary elemants to links, images, and footnotes are added by filling in a popover.

Pasted rich text and imported Word documents keep their formatting when converted to Markdown.

Attachments such as images, text notes, keywords and writing goals can be added to content. And to organize them keywords can be added.

Ulysses saves everything in the app so there's no file management outside of the editor involved. It organizes content in groups (folders) and sheets (files), has a powerful, easy to use search and allows adding keywords to attachments to help them be organized and found quickly.

Groups can have an unlimited amount of subgroups and the title of subgroup shows up in the pane view. Sheets can be split up, merged, glued together and easily moved around in the sheet pane by dragging and dropping. Great for splitting up larger documents into manageable chunks while still keeping an overview of the whole project and having the ability to move sections around quickly.

Contents of a group can be filtered by text, keywords or change date within headings, code blocks, images or any other marked up text. Filters can contain a combination of conditions and be saved to make a new group. Saved filters can be moved around to different groups and will return filtered results for that group. Selecting multiple groups will show the combined sheets of those groups.

You can operate Ulysses via keyboard only. No need for mouse.

The editor can export to Plain Text, RTF, Word, HTML, ePub and PDF with customizable styles for each option. It can also preview HTML directly in the browser.

There's no live-preview pane or an external previewer necessary. Ulysses displays styling inline.

Ulysses has options for highlighting current line, showing line numbers and enabling typewriter mode. Typewriter mode defines a place on the screen where the cursor should be so eyes are kept focusing in one place on the screen.

Content can be synchronised across devices via Apple's iCloud.

Ulysses comes with an excellently written documentation that covers everything there is to know about the software, including an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts as well as short and sweet introduction to Markdown and its benefits.

Ulysses is available for both macOS and iOS. This, combined with the cloud syncing allows users to work on their projects using any Apple device they have at the time.

The editor tracks statistics that shows how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages a document contains and estimated reading time for slow, average, and fast readers. The statistics display in a popover that can be torn-off so it's constantly visible.

Goals such as how many characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, lines or pages should be written can be set to help get motivated.

Groups, tagging, and notes for each document.

Staff is helpful in answering questions on how to use the app.

A time (10hrs) and usage limited demo for Ulysses III is available.

Services like Paper (Dropbox), Evernote, Google, OneNote (Microsoft)... and many others, keep your data in format they can read when it syncs with their servers. That means their admins can read your data (see recent scandal with Evernote privacy policy), they can be compelled to give it to law-enforcement and, if hackers manage to breach their servers, the hackers can read it too.

With Notebooks, you choose how to sync your data, which means that you can do it using a privacy-friendly service, such as SpiderOak, Tresorit, Sync.com or iDrive, which sync your data using end-to-end encryption. This means that although they use their servers to sync your data, their servers store an encrypted version to which the service does not hold the key. Your data stays private.

Notebooks have many features including WYSIWYG editing and Markdown support. While these may be considered power-user features, they are there if the user ever needs them. This makes the app versatile, as it can appeal to the user who just wants to take notes just as much as the user who needs to edit complicated documents.

There are no reoccurring fees connected to this app: pay once for the platform you would like to use it on, and that's it.

As an Evernote alternative, Notebooks is available on iOS as well as OS X and Windows operating systems. This makes for a convenient way to manage one's notes or tasks on multiple devices