You may have marveled at this here image and thought to yourself: “Well, holy cow, what IS this thing?!?” Or you might have thought: “This is INsane. Ab-so-freaking-lute-ly IN-SANE! Prince? WTPfhew!”

Whatever your thoughts were, let me answer them for you: Ulysses 3 is a plain text editor. Plain text editors can’t do images and links. Sure, you might write **[some abstract][links]** syntax to get an **![image][]** during output, but you won’t be able to click on

[links]: http://wherever.they.go

and neither can you quickly view the

[image]: c:\\My%20Documents\Screen352.jpg

you’ve just added. And it only gets worse with inline links, titles or older texts with references to images with generic names. Define “clutter”, would you?

RTF is a bit better in this regard, but apart from the fact that it’s no option for us (or you, using Ulysses), it has its own share of problems: How do you edit links or add attributes (such as title/alt/size etc.)? How do you manage images (e.g. exchange one image for another) or add attributes? Also, try and search for images or links across several RTF documents…

So for Ulysses 3 we set out to do the impossible:

  1. enable insertion of images and links right within the editor
  2. enable image and link previews
  3. enable editing of image/link attributes
  4. keep the simple approach of plain text editing (i.e. just type to enter images and links)
  5. preserve the ability to edit linked text (e.g. keep mouse clicks mapped to text selection)
  6. by all means avoid visual clutter within the editor

And we think we’ve succeeded. In fact, we might even have over-achieved, in that Ulysses’ editor has completely spoiled our ability to work in other editors. But that’s a side-effect we’re willing to endure.

We believe you will, too.

Have fun.