Ulysses Blogging Review

Ulysses is by far my favourite app for writing, publishing, and updating blog posts. I use an external keyboard with a 12.9 inch iPad Pro for blogging most of the time, but I often begin posts on my phone, or make a quick edit between coding sessions on the Mac. Ulysses makes this workflow super smooth. Because publishing includes images and metadata, there’s no need to visit the WordPress app afterwards to touch things up. For me this is probably the killer feature. Still, there is one rough edge to the Ulysses blogging workflow I’d love to see improved.

This review was written using Ulysses 24.1.

Killer Features

Ulysses’ killer features for my workflow are:

Instant sync between iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
WordPress publishing integration.
Support for images.

There are a lot of writing apps that sync between devices, (iA Writer and Drafts are two I’ve used a lot), and some that have WordPress integration. However support for images on top of these two standard features makes Ulysses a complete solution for me. I can publish directly to WordPress from Ulysses, and walk away. No need to use another app to add images or mess with layouts. Bliss.

Rough Edge

The worst thing about blogging with Ulysses is that it doesn’t offer any image resizing. If you accidentally place a huge image on the page, there’s no warning; publishing hangs silently for a long time if you’re on a slow connection. (It hung for so long the first time I saw this that I assumed it had crashed and had to force-close the app.)

Feature Wish List

I would also love to see Ulysses add some other conveniences for bloggers:

One-click “update post”, rather than the current four-step process of: “export” → “post” → “check metadata” → “post for real”.
Auto-publish updates when navigating away from a published post.
Auto-sorting posts by published date. (It currently only takes into account created or modified dates.)
Ability to import existing posts from WordPress.
Dictation app on Apple Watch to quickly add notes to the inbox.
iOS Widgets showing recently edited sheets would be useful.

Verdict

I would recommend trying Ulysses out if you want a complete solution for distraction-free writing, publishing, and editing of blog posts; even more so if you are inclined to use images on your blog.

For blogging, I give Ulysses a solid 4/5 keep up the good work!