1. Apple Mac Review

. Pros Fast and accurate grammar and spell check.

Excellent interfaces across platforms. Premium writing style tools.

Good mobile keyboard. Cons Expensive. No support for Office on Mac. No offline editing mode. Bottom Line It costs a lot, but the real-time spelling and grammar checker, Grammarly, provides an excellent set of writing and editing tools across a wide range of platforms. Everyone, including professional writers, makes mistakes in their writing.

Even when you get the basics down, hunting down higher-level grammar and style nuances can be overwhelming. Grammarly, an online grammar and spelling assistant, can help out in those scenarios.

This suggests spelling, grammar, and style changes in real time and can even edit for specific genres. Although its paid subscriptions are a bit expensive and the service does not work offline, Grammarly's wide range of supported platforms and ease of use make it well worth the cost. Improving Grammar (Almost) Everywhere Grammarly costs $29.95 per month, $59.95 per quarter, or $139.95 per year. If this price seems high, know that Grammarly frequently offers subscription discounts. For the price of entry, you get customized checks for different document types, a plagiarism filter, and a function to help diversify your vocabulary, among other extras. Grammarly also offers a limited free version that checks for critical spelling and grammar errors. For businesses, there's a $10-per-member-per-month subscription with admin and management controls, with a three-user minimum.

Grammarly offers native desktop clients for both Windows and macOS, browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, and a add-in (Windows only). Grammarly is also usable on Android and iOS via a mobile keyboard app, which I discuss later. Recently, Grammarly announced support for two other major writing platforms: Google Docs and Medium.

Note that, at the time of publishing, the Google Docs integration only works via the and is still rolling out to users. Nonetheless, both expansions are welcome updates, and most users should now be able to use Grammarly on their preferred platform. Still, I would like to see Grammarly added to Office on the Mac, Apple's iWork Suite, and Libre Office for Linux users. Getting Started and Security Grammarly checks your writing against its database of content and style errors as well as anonymously collected data from its daily active users. The downside of this real-time model is that Grammarly requires an internet connection to work.

In use, Grammarly underlines critical mistakes in red (spelling and basic grammar), and advanced errors in yellow (style and best practices), though the latter capability is limited to premium users. Hovering over any of the indicated words or phrases brings up the option to fix the error directly or read a more-detailed explanation of the mistake. I appreciate the descriptions' clear language and use of sample sentences to illustrate mistakes. It's more detailed than what you get with the built-in grammar checkers of both Google Docs and Office 365. I also find the error count that Grammarly adds at the bottom of every document to be an efficient way of showing how much editing work I have left. However, you need to be aware of the potential privacy and security risks of Grammarly, since it actively checks everything you type. Several months ago, with how the Grammarly browser extensions handle auth tokens.

Grammarly resolved the issue shortly after this release and noted that the vulnerability only had the potential to expose data saved in the Grammarly Editor. Even though Grammarly handled the response well, you still must exercise extreme caution with software that can view and modify your input.

That said, Grammarly does differ from a key logger in a few important ways. For instance, Grammarly requires your permission to access what you are writing and visually indicates when it is working. A company representative also told me that Grammarly 'is blocked from accessing anything you type in text fields marked 'sensitive,' such as credit card forms or password fields.' I still recommend you disable Grammarly for such sites in case they are not configured correctly, as well as for things like sensitive legal documents. Grammarly's Apps I installed the Grammarly Desktop app on my Windows 10 machine and had no issues signing in to my account.

The app looks great and the layout is highly functional; I particularly like the side panel's dark accents and minimalist icons. However, I would prefer if Grammarly managed its desktop app via the Windows Store, since those apps are limited in what they can access on your system. Users can choose between composing text directly in an editor and importing an existing document.

Grammarly recommends using the import feature to preserve text formatting, but it didn't retain paragraph spacing when I imported a test Word document. I wish that the composer included basic paragraph and text formatting features to avoid this issue when moving between applications. Click on the Profile icon to make edits to your personal dictionary and switch your writing language between a few different variants of English: American, Australian, British, and Canadian. Grammarly is not currently available in any other language than English, so it won't supplement unless, of course, you are trying to learn English. Within a document, the right side of the window houses tabs for spelling and grammar errors, premium writing checks, a plagiarism checker, a human proofreader option, and an overall writing score based on these factors. As mentioned earlier, this score is helpful for getting a quick check of your writing progress and how much revising you have left.

Grammarly recently introduced two new features in the desktop application: Goals and Insights. Goals launches whenever you import a new document; it helps Grammarly adjust its edits based on the context of your writing. For example, you can specify your intent (inform, describe, convince, tell a story), audience, style, and emotion. Premium users can choose between different writing domains, including Academic, Technical, and Creative.

The Insights popup shows you general data such as word count and reading time, in addition to vocabulary and readability metrics. These metrics are calculated based on comparison with other Grammarly users and the Readability score is based on the. Both additions make Grammarly more useful at a higher level than that of simple error checking. On the web, the Grammarly plug-in reviews everything you write in real time, from composing emails to jotting down notes.

The extension marks mistakes with underlines the same way it does on any other platform, and you can click on each word to get more information about the error. Note that if you work within a content management system, Grammarly may insert code into the source text at the spot of the error. It is never a good idea to have inconsistent or unnecessary code on any page or article. The Microsoft Office Add-in lives as a menu item in the Office Ribbon for both Word and Outlook. You can toggle the types of issues that you want to view in your current document, including spelling, punctuation, and style errors. Grammarly opens as a sidebar window and shows mistakes in a contextual location within the document.

Click on the specific corrections to see details. Keep in mind that enabling Grammarly disables the Ctrl-Z keyboard shortcut, as well as revision tracking.

Word's built-in grammar and style checker is not affected by either of these actions. A Useful Companion I found myself using Grammarly quite a bit. You could argue that Grammarly encourages lazy writing and that's at least partially accurate, as some people will take advantage of its thorough checks without bothering to learn from the insight it provides.

It's well suited for people actively looking to improve their writing but still caters to users who aren't aware that they need help. However, Grammarly's real value is its ability to highlight your most common mistakes and help you avoid them going forward. Occasionally, I did find the real-time edits distracting in my testing and disabled Grammarly so that I could finish typing a thought without being interrupted. Grammarly might be more useful during the revision portion of your writing process as a final check for errors and inconsistencies. I was hard-pressed to find much of a difference between the free version of Grammarly and the built-in spelling, grammar, and style checker in the latest version of Microsoft Office. Both correctly identified spelling errors, convoluted phrases, and incorrect grammar usage.

However, I found Grammarly's advanced editing checks, which help you clean up all the middling grammar tidbits, suggest alternatives to commonly used words, as well as provide contextual edits for the sake of clarity, highly useful. For example, Grammarly is a stickler for getting rid of unnecessary commas. Another clear benefit of Grammarly is that it works in more places across your workflow. Occasionally, both Grammarly and Office make wrong suggestions, which proves that you still need to pay attention to edits instead of just mindlessly accepting them. For example, it suggested I add an article in a few places that didn't require one. Still, some users might not like the omission of an 'Accept All' button strictly for some of the more rudimentary spacing and comma usage errors.

Note that even authorities on grammar, such as AP, Merriam Webster, and Oxford sometimes disagree on some rules like hyphenation and capitalization, so no grammar-checking tool is perfect. For instance, Grammarly suggested I capitalize the word 'kanban,' since 'it appears that the word kanban may be a proper noun in this context,' even though Merriam Webster and Oxford do not do so. Each week, Grammarly sends an email recapping your writing activity, called Grammarly Insights. This provided me some helpful information, such as the three most common errors I made, as well as metrics that mostly correspond with what the Insights tab shows from the desktop editor.

It also highlighted some neat statistics, such as how many words it checked and how many unique words I used. Mobile Keyboard. Grammarly's keyboard app is available on both Android and iOS devices. I tested the app on my Google Pixel running. As you might expect, the Grammarly keyboard helps you correct grammar and spelling errors as you go. It's useful for everything from writing emails to composing social media posts to editing long-form documents.

In Settings, you can select either the light or dark color theme, choose whether to show key borders and the number row, or toggle vibration, sound, and popup on keypress. I like that you can even adjust the keyboard height on the screen. Grammarly looks very similar to Gboard, though it is missing a few key Gboard features.

For example, Grammarly currently does not support swipe typing, though the company says it is working on adding that feature. It also lacks all of Gboard's extras that push you to Google services, such as web search and translation. That said, I appreciate the clean design and don't think feature parity should be Grammarly's goal. Power users may disagree.

As you type, Grammarly pops up suggestions and corrections automatically. You can swipe through and accept these changes with ease or hit the green Grammarly icon in the upper-left corner to check it again. If you tap on individual edits, Grammarly opens a card-based interface with more in-depth explanations. The experience is fluid, and it's easy to go through edits quickly. As in the app's desktop counterpart, the keyboard edits and suggestions are usually helpful and accurate, especially if you pay for the full version.

The auto-correct for spelling is just as good as what you get with the standard keyboard, but its corrective grammar edits are its biggest appeal. The keyboard settings are fairly robust. In addition to the appearance and behavior settings I already mentioned, Grammarly lets you change basic editing options. You can toggle auto-correction and auto-capitalization options, select a language preference (American, Australian, British, or Canadian English), and even allow it to suggest contact names as you type. Adp vantage hcm vs quickbooks for mac.

The remaining sections let you give feedback, access the support portal, or switch accounts. Grammarly Improves Your Writing Grammarly's thoroughness when it comes to spelling, grammar, and style suggestions is its greatest strength. The premium version is a luxury at $29.95 per month, but writers of all kinds can benefit from adding Grammarly to their workflow. Although we would still like to see an offline mode and support for Microsoft Office on the Mac, recent additions, such as Google Docs support and new features for the desktop editor, make Grammarly easy to recommend.

It’s been a while since moving from to using as a static site generator for this website. Squarespace is beautifully designed, very resilient and for the most part dependable (they experienced several DDOS attacks in the past).

But it’s not flexible when it comes to deeply customizing your site or when writing content. Site generators like Pelican are extremely malleable. Since they process markdown files and images stored in certain pre-defined folders, the user only needs a text editor and an internet connected device to write and post. Up until now, I’ve been using a combination of Apps for writing posts depending on which platform I’m working on: On windows and Mac, I use and on iOS I use. Each of them is arguably the best text editor on their respective platform. Editorial may be lagging behind as it hasn’t been updated in a long time, but nevertheless continues to work fine on iOS 10.

After posts were written, I would use as a glue between devices and to move files around between folders in order to generate the site. It’s a pretty straight forward process, with some caveats: visualizing posts with images on the iPad was a pain because of where the site’s content files are located in my computer (i.e. Not in Dropbox) and the way markdown links work. There was a lot of massaging involved deleting temporary files and shuffling images around. Also, in order to work offline with syncing through Dropbox, I had to remember opening Editorial and syncing the files beforehand. Enter Ulysses I read a lot about Ulysses before writing this post. People are using it to writing blog posts, novels, do research and even writing.

I have yet to find a bad review. But what is so special about it? Well, for starters everything is in one library, that’s the main feature that sets it apart from similar Apps. All documents (known as Sheets) and attachments are in one place, which allows to have a consistent look and previewing documents everywhere.

There is an and a, and syncing is beautifully done through iCloud. It’s probably the best iCloud syncing implementation I have seen on any platform. Text, images and attachments were available in all platforms almost instantly in my tests. There is also support for, but not all features are available when syncing that way (at least for now). There is no Windows application, which is a big disadvantage for those of us who are forced to live in that environment during office hours. However, Ulysses allows to sync with External Folders and Dropbox folders can easily be added to the library on both the Mac App and the iOS App.

The library, including synced external folders, can be used offline. Ulysses for Mac - Preferences Pane. As seen above, Ulysses allows direct publishing to Medium and Wordpress, but there is no official support for other blogging platforms. That’s when the flexibility of Pelican and other comes into play. With some additional tools, posts can be sent to the Pelican in an almost seamless process. General Setup Here is the general layout of the process: From Ulysses to Pelican - General Process.

As it can be seen, the heavy lifting will be done by a Python 3.5 Script. Posts can be written on either Ulysses for Mac or Ulysses for iOS, everything will be synced through iCloud. Images can be imported into the library from multiple sources, as always, and they will be automatically copied and placed in Pelican’s content folders at the end of the process, ready to be used when generating the website. Alternatively, images from outside Ulysses library can be manually put in Pelican’s content folders. As long as they are adequately referenced in the post/sheet, they will be used when generating the website. Here is what is needed on each platform: On the Mac. (more on this below).

Bash script for executing the Python script. The Python script can be run directly without this script. However, I’m using it to facilitate execution, do some testing and save some lines when running the Python script from the command line. The Bash Script is just one line in the following format: '$1' So, it would be something like this: /anaconda/envs/Anaconda3/bin/python3.5 /Scripts/Python/pelicaninjection.py '$1' Remember to make the file executable like so: chmod 700 pelicaninjection.py On iOS. This is one of my favorites apps on the platform.

It allows to customize your device and automate repetitive tasks in an elegant way. It’s tremendously effective in filling the gaps that separate iOS as a mobile platform from a full feature desktop OS. for Workflow App (I wish there was a better way to referencing the App and its actions). Python Script This part needs a bit more explanation as some configuration is required for the whole process to work as intended.

Don’t worry, it’s very easy to setup. The is written in Python 3.5 (although it runs fine on Python 2.7). Here is a general overview of what the script does.

It’s the glue that bonds all together: Ulysses sheet, custom HTML and Pelican contents folder. From Ulysses to Pelican - Python Script It should be run passing an argument that must be either a Zip file or a Markdown file, which are two of the three file extensions Ulysses can export to when exporting sheets to Markdown format (the Zip file includes all the images referenced in the sheet in addition to the Markdown file). The third is a format, but the script is not compatible with it (yet).

If a Zip file is passed, the script extracts the images and copies them into the Images content folder in Pelican. Then, it takes the Markdown file, renames it based on the Slug (which is contained in the header of every post), inserts Pelican’s image output folder on every Markdown image link and performs what I call HTML Code Injection. Markdown files can include raw HTML code which is then passed to the rendered HTML page. HTML Code Injection is just a method I use to abbreviate the code that should be included in the final rendered page. For example, the Python script includes a function called beforeafter which inserts the necessary HTML code in the Markdown file to show the before-and-after image comparison I use on some review posts, like. In order to accomplish that, I just include the following line in the Ulysses sheet at the place where I want the image comparison to be inserted: beforefilename afterfilename For this particular case, the beforefilename and afterfilename image files should be manually copied to Pelican’s image content folder in order to be rendered (i.e. They are not included in Ulysses library).

Keep in mind there is no need to use this feature, it’s just an additional capability I’ve included for my particular case. I use this methodology to include the code that is later rendered as. One thing you do need to do is configuring the script Constants holding the paths to Pelican content folders ( POSTSFOLDER and IMAGESFOLDER) as well as the path to the output image folder relative to the site (in the case below ”/images/“). For that, just edit the following section at the top of the script according to the way your Pelican folders are arranged on your system. # Constant Definition # - # Path to be prepended to image links in markdown file, like so:!(IMAGELINK). IMAGELNK = '/images/' # Pelican Content Folders: POSTSFOLDER = 'Insert Path to Pelican markdown content folders.'

IMAGESFOLDER = 'Insert Path to Pelican image content folders.' FILESFOLDER = 'Insert Path to Pelican files content folders. Not used in this version of the script.' # - That’s it!

That’s all you need to do. The script is free to use and modify as needed. Note - There is no need to rename the file when exporting from Ulysses.

The script takes the Slug field in the header and renames it accordingly. Be aware that the script will replace any file in the output folder that shares the same name/slug as the one being converted.

Sheet attachments are not transferred to Pelican since they are not exported by Ulysses in the zip file. Workflow App The and associated are instrumental for the process to work seamlessly on the iOS platform. As seen in the diagram above, the workflow sends the exported sheet from Ulysses to the Python script in the remote machine where Pelican is run. This is done over an SSH connection (through Workflow’s Run Script Over SSH action), so it’s fast, reliable and secure. From Ulysses to Pelican - Workflow. Since Ulysses can send either a zip file or a text file when exporting from iOS, the Workflow automatically detects the file extension and reacts accordingly.

When the workflow is imported, it’ll ask for the necessary info to set everything up: folder path for the script on the remote machine and login credentials. Everything will be stored locally. Ulysses for Mac The Mac OS version of Ulysses is an extremely polished product. You can tell are a detail-oriented team. Simplicity and elegance are probably the two terms that would describe the App more accurately.

It’s very responsive for the most part (it was a bit slow with long Sheets but that was remedied in the last update). Ulysses for Mac - Main Window. Both the Mac OS and the iOS versions are continuously updated. Not because of bugs needing to be squashed, but because the team constantly adds features and refines the product.

Apple Mac Review

It’s truly a pleasure to use an App ecosystem in which so much thought has been put into. When working on Ulysses for Mac, the process of exporting to Pelican is very straight forward: just export the Ulysses Sheet in Text and then Markdown format to your disk. If the Sheet has images, they will be exported alongside the Markdown file, in the same folder (note: they will not be compressed into a Zip file like on the iOS version). Since the script can only take either Markdown (.md) files or compressed files (.zip) you can either compressed the files and pass the resulting Zip file as an argument to the shell script or manually copy the image files to the appropriate Content folder on Pelican and run the Markdown file through the Shell script. So, for the first option, the following should be typed on the Command Line (obviously, change the path and the filenames below per your particular case): /path-to-script/pelicaninjection.sh ulyssesExport.zip That’s the manual way of doing it. There is an even more streamlined way to go through this process: through an Workflow on the Mac. Alfred Workflow for automating the Ulysses export process.

Using this Alfred Workflow, I just export the files to disk from Ulysses, select them on the Finder, type Alt CMD and select Send to Pelican from the Menu. Done!, everything should now be on Pelican’s Content folders adequately formatted and ready for the site to be generated.

Ulysses for iOS The iOS version of Ulysses has become one of my favorite apps on the platform. It simply invites you to continuing writing. It’s elegantly designed, very responsive, with great iCloud synchronization. As mentioned before, it’s possibly the best third party iCloud implementation as of today. Ulysses for iOS on iPad Pro.

Everything on the App feels native and well thought out. All features on the Mac version have been brought to iOS without compromising the user interface: attachments, tags/keywords, external folders, etc. Images can be imported from the Photos App or from the other Apps or cloud services, such as Dropbox. Exporting sheets works as expected and very similar to the way it has been implemented on the Mac. The procedure to export to Pelican is as follows:. Tap on the Share icon and select the format. In this case Text and then Markdown.

Tap on the three dots ( ) and then Open in Another App. On the new window, select Run Workflow and once the list of workflows is shown, just select Remote Pelican Injection. It’s that easy. Putting It All Together I tried to make the process as easy and streamlined as possible on both platforms, MacOS and iOS. Looking at the paragraphs above, it may seem a bit complicated, but trust me, it’s not. As an example, here is a video for exporting this whole post from Ulysses for iOS into Pelican. When it’s done, all images and Markdown file are adequately formatted and organized within Pelican content folders.

It only takes 17 seconds. Note: Disregard the error at the end of the video, the Workflow was run with a dummy IP for demo purposes.