Roben Kleene

Ulysses 16 With iPad Split View

Huge update to the fantastic macOS and iOS writing app Ulysses, the new features include a split view on iPad to view two documents side by side. Here’s the list of ways to open the second view:

  1. Drag a sheet from the sheet list to either edge of the screen — this will trigger a nice animation and then open the dragged sheet next to the current view.
  2. Activate “Second Editor” from the editor settings. This will open the current sheet next to the current view.
  3. Tap and hold the Export button in the editor. A menu will pop up and offer “Export in Second Editor”.
  4. With an external keyboard attached, you can either hit command-option-3 (⌘⌥3) to open the current sheet in editor mode, or hit command-option-6 (⌘⌥6), to open the export preview of the current sheet.

The choice of ⌘⌥3 as the keyboard shortcut is interesting, this is based on the Ulysses keyboard shortcut ⌘3 to switch to the editor view1. I’m struck how, much like the built-in iOS multi-tasking features, none of these ways of opening a second view feel like first-class citizens. Contrast this with macOS where keyboard shortcuts like ⌘T or ⌘N, or just double-clicking a file, are all first-class citizens. When I think about what makes working on iOS feel so much slower than macOS, the number one difference is the lack of first-class multitasking support on iOS2.

  1. I don’t see a keyboard shortcut to switch focus between the two views. ↩︎

  2. Just to be clear, the responsibility here is entirely on Apple, not Ulysses. It’s Apple’s job to implement these conventions and Ulysses job to follow them. One of the fascinating things about iOS is just how small it is, there are only a handful of user-interface paradigms. On one hand, that smallness is beautiful and elegant, but on the other hand, it means the list of problems left to solve on the platform feels endless—can those problems be solved without compromising the platforms elegance? How you answer that question is a litmus test for whether you think Apple’s future includes macOS. ↩︎