What you need to know
- Ulysses 20 is rolling out now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
- Ulysses for Mac gains LanguageTool Plus-powered grammar and style checking.
- Grammar and style are found in the brand new dashboard, alongside a host of other improvements.
The developers behind the excellent Ulysses text editor for iPhone, iPad, and Mac have released Ulysses 20, a major update across platforms that adds some important features that should appeal to any writer, no matter what kind of writing they do.
The headline feature of Ulysses 20 is actually Mac-exclusive for now. Ulysses users will now have access to in-app grammar and style checking on the Mac app. This capability, powered by LanguageTool Plus, not only offers corrections to grammar, but also suggestions to improve your writing through style suggestions.
The grammar and style check covers a wide variety of elements in your document, including capitalization, punctuation, semantics, and redundancy. You'll be able to view each suggestion one at a time, but you can also view them by category, making them easier to deal with if, for instance, you have a recurring mistake, or want Ulysses to stop suggesting something. Additionally, LanguageTool Plus, the tool that powers these features, is continually updated, so the features should get even better over time.
Grammar and style check arrives in Ulysses 20 for Mac today, and will appear in a separate update on iPhone and iPad this fall.
The other major addition in Ulysses 20 concerns not only the Mac app, but the iPhone and iPad app, as well. The new dashboard takes the place of the right-hand sidebar in Ulysses, absorbing its functions and adding some new ones.
The dashboard contains multiple views, each with a different focus. The first is an overall picture of your document, including vital stats on any goals you've set, your keywords, an outline of your document's headlines, and any attachments, links, and footnotes you've got. Essentially, it's an overview of what you'll find in the other tabs.
Speaking of the other tabs, here's what they do. The progress view keeps track of all of the statistics about your document, including word count, number of paragraphs, and various reading times. You also use this view to attach goals to a document. The outline view focuses on the structure of a document, including headlines, annotations, and links.
The annotation tab shows you all of your text's annotations, like marked passages or deletions. This is also the tab where you'll find your notes. There's also an attachments view to manage any media in your document. Finally, on Mac, there's a tab specifically for grammar and style check.
You can find all of this, plus the usual spate of bug fixes and performance improvements, in Ulysses 20 right now.
Get the app
Ulysses 20 is available as a free download on the App Stores for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, though there is a subscription ($5.99 per month, $49.99 per year) to unlock the app for all of your devices after a free trial.
Ulysses remains one of the best writing apps available across Apple platforms, and it gets even better with the style and grammar checker on Mac, along with the brand new dashboard.
