Just speaking for myself, the advantages of Ulysses and Scrivener go way beyond any markdown capabilities, though they both handle markdown nicely -- Ulysses especially is built around markdown as an editing environment. What they both do, as you allude to in your comment about the "notebook" panel, is to do your writing in as small a segments as you want and need, then you can re-organize them as needed. They both also let you read your total document in one window, so you can see what you've written as a whole, rather than simply a collection of segments.

Scrivener has a lot more whistles and bells for managing your work, collecting research and more.

As for why I'm looking forward to Ulysses for iPad, there are several functions in Ulysses that you currently can't use in Daedalus. For example, regular Ulysses documents have an attachment bar, which allows you to associate notes, images and files with the open document. But if you're sharing files with Daedalus, this feature is disabled, as Daedalus does not support it.

Steve Z.

jaslar wrote:

I haven't used Ulysses, although I spent quite an enjoyable hour this
morning writing in Daedulus, which is a brilliant bit of programming.

But I wonder if someone could enlighten me about the advantages of
Ulysses (and I think Scrivener, too). As I understand it, both have
these similarities:

- an editing panel that handles Markdown. I get that some environments
are cleaner and more fun to write in.
- a "notebook" type panel (or panels) that allows for the collection and
some kind of re-arrangement of notes, snippets. That re-arrangement
piece of a library of related notes is the outlining connection.

So I'm guessing the eagerness to have Ulysses on the iPad rather than
just Daedulus is that ready access to the library of snippets. Is that
right? Or is it the re-ordering of that information?

Just as an aside, when I look at Letterspace, I don't really see a
difference (other than support for the tasks markup, and the use of
gestures) between that and Simplenote. That is: a collection of
individual notes, searchable, taggable,with a nice editor attached. But
Letterspace is limited to iCloud, whereas I can get to Simplenote data
from any device. And I don't see the ability to manipulate the order of
anything.

Have I got this right?