Shawn Blanc his team have been working on a course for helping people get the most out of Ulysses. Seeing Shawn’s posts had me reviewing my own usage: he touches on a few items I was either not aware of or had never thought to try.
Once he shared that he’d be building this course, I finally took the time to dig into the features in Ulysses that have been peripheral to my usage. The biggest gap was my lack of understanding of the different methods for adding to your primary content. There are four content types to consider:
- notes
- comments
- footnotes
- annotations
The Ulysses team cover these in a couple posts. But neither of those sit down and list out a direct comparison of these items, nor state the best scenario for using each. Different from the last 3, notes are not stored inline, but in the attachments pane. They’re document-centric and give you a place to store thoughts about a sheet as a whole.
The last 3 are inline and serve related-yet-different purposes. Comments (and comment blocks) allow you to add your thoughts about a line or section of text. They’re great in that they stand out and do not count towards you word/character totals. As well, should you export your content, the comments are not included.
Footnotes and annotations are last and are the most similar. Both allow you to add ancillary information to a piece of text. I'll likely start using notes more often, but footnotes and annotations are overkill and not applicable to the kinds of writing I do.
Short story long, it’s been nice to get a better feel for Ulysses and what’s possible with it. If you haven’t yet, check out Learn Ulysses from Shawn and crew.
