I’ve been using MarsEdit for many years. Before that, I can’t remember what tool I was using but I obviously started on WordPress within their web interface then I discovered off-line writing and it was life-changing.
Perhaps a good throwback is that my first CMS was actually LiveJournal and I used an application called XJournal that surprisingly still launches on El-Capitan and has every journal I ever posted since year 2000. I then started a few websites ran completely off PMachine. I then moved to Expression Engine and at some point around 2007, I made the move to WordPress. Movable Type never appealed to me despite it being the geek CMS of choice for many years. I think it was actually Laughing Squid’s positive posts about WordPress that got me to switch.
It would appear I started using MarsEdit in the spring of 2010 to post to my WordPress sites. 6 years with one application is a long time and honestly, MarsEdit hasn’t changed that much since then.
Ulysses is a huge departure. Markdown, iCloud syncing, Typewriter mode and a really well thought out design. I feel more inspired in using it and dark-mode full-screen is what originally had me writing in Byword for a while and pasting the plain text over to MarsEdit.
The main thing Ulysses loses that MarsEdit does so well is the ability to connect to Flickr and embed those photos with one click into a blog post. For travel posts with lots of photos, I’ll be using MarsEdit for now. For everything else, I’m using Ulysses. The price is high, no doubt at that but I’m only using the Mac version and ignoring the iOS version for now because who writes more than emoji on an iOS device?
You can download a 10-Hour trial on their website. It’s great for writing Linked posts like I do here and designed to scale up to full novels if that’s what you’re trying to do.