The Mac App Store is having a sale on creative apps, and so if you’re a writer looking to change your life for less money, here are a few apps I use and recommend:
Ulysses III: I can’t say enough good things about Ulysses, which gets better and better all the time. Especially if you still write in Word, I feel sorry for you, and even if I don’t know you, because you’re a human being I love you too much to stand idly by while you waste your life unnecessarily. Learn markdown and come to love plain text! I write everything in Ulysses, which in turn keeps everything organized and backed up, and am close to finishing my first book written entirely within it and it’s unalloyed pleasure to work with it. Be happy and buy it at now for 50% off.
Slugline: I haven’t used this much because, you know, I’m only just about to write that screenplay, but it’s a beautiful plain text app that uses the Fountain syntax for script formatting.
Scrivener: I’ve tried to love this app that a lot of writers, mostly novel writers, use and love. Maybe you will succeed where I have failed. What it can do well is format, so even though I’d never use it for a writing environment I can see using it as a place to typeset a book for PDF export and printing, although I use Mellel for that.
Acorn 4: The best light not-at-all-lightweight image editing app.
Marked 2: This is not part of the creative app sale, but is on sale this week. If you write in plain text, you’ll need eventually to preview/export/print what you write in the font and format of your choice. Ulysses has a function like this built-in, but Marked 2 is a bit more feature-rich and will of course work with any other editor.