It’s a nice app for light users, but if you try to use it heavily as a detailed infinity board with lots and lots of notes spread around the canvas visually, you’ll quickly get flustered by the lack of quality-of-life improvements . Examples would be lack of setting text styles , requiring -every-single-textbox- you create to click through three or more separate ui flows to change the: color, size, emphasis, (and font).
It’s a nice concept but their devs have moved on and barely update it at all. Trivially small feature updates are spun as huge improvements , but only released every six months to a year (!).
For the same paradigm but with a much, much better user experience with constant quality of life upgrades and devs that actually spend full time job on it, use Margin Notes 3 (iOS).
I agree, Margin Notes is incredible. I'm still learning to use it efficiently, though. Do you by any chance have any pointers to good guides on the workflow and general usage, besides the built-in docs and forum?
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any. Being the hn type I enjoyed figuring out the nuances through heavy use. I also frequently held down the Apple key to see the shortcuts, and worked off from there. (In comparison to Liquid Text - liquid Text has so few to 0 quality of life features, there was no nuance to figure out, other than knowing what poor quality of life implied for doing the visual styling that you needed to do).
The one issue with Margin Notes is that it refuses to let you manually position the frames. I often ended up doing nested frames, so it wasn’t a big deal, but visually it was still jarring to see the highlight boxes that you’ve made to visually switch up their positioning on you due to the auto arrange.
I haven’t used Margin Notes in a year. I have given up on both LiquidText and MarginNotes - neither were able to offer me the visual learning I needed. The former was too inefficient to stylize everything by hand without even keyboard shortcuts for bold, underline, etc, and the latter was too heavy handed in its insistence on visual placement for the user.
I ended up just using CardFlow (iOS). It is a great tool for visual learners. It has enough quality of life features to be efficient, but you also don’t end up trying to import every pdf into it - allowing you to focus on making just the key notes.
Fair point about the updates, we're getting ready to launch a few bigger ones (es. a Win and MacOS version). Hopefully we can improve the other flows you mention. (I'm founder @ LT)
Wish we could! Just not enough people yet--have to keep focused on max return on investment. :) But we do plan to make a web version down the line, and remove the platform dependence entirely (or at least largely).
Hi, long time liquid text user here. I’ve been asking for this simple feature forever but it’s never been implemented. Can we just create a dang blank document? I know we can import documents and webpages, but how hard would it be to just let us start off with a blank paged document without having to import something?
I found MarginNote to be a bit too fiddly for my taste, but there's no question it's the more powerful app. Perhaps it has improved since I tried the early 3.0 release.
Totally agreed. It ended up being too fiddly - mostly due to their annoying auto arranged thing. Just let us throw the frames manually around; and let us select a subset of frames to have the program visually auto arrange for us, if we choose we need it (note: you can kinda do this, but then your subtree is tied to the auto arrange of its parents, until root node, which is the global canvas). There is ability (iirc) for manual placement of frames at root level, but not at any other level (this here is the crux of the issue).
I am more and more reluctant to use any note taking app. Ideally, notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years. No app can offer that kind of guarantee. I switched to using plaintext files, and do not look back. The only thing one needs is to have a clear workflow to make sure notes remain accessible and useful. I like the Zettelkasten method for this (see eg https://zettelkasten.de, no affiliation).
Not to criticize this app in particular, I actually quite like the concepts listed (which remind me of the Zettelkasten idea). Just the whole idea of keeping my thoughts in an app. Even if it does allow to export the data, it is probably in a format that is difficult to use outside of the app, and thus close to useless.
I want to copy paste screenshots and images. Ideally it should store the screenshot in a folder and automatically link to it. Do you use anything like that?
Actually the one I'm developing offers that [1], as it stores notes as plain Markdown files on disk, it doesn't get any more future-proof and no vendor lock-in than that.
i just tried it and i cannot figure out how i use media with the app. even just a simple embedded image i cannot get to work (i never see the image). drag&drop an image from firefox into a note doesn't work either (nothing happens after i drop it).
That part of the app is a bit rough still, that kind of drag & drop interaction isn't supported yet.
If you're under macOS you can copy/paste images to attach them.
Otherwise you can add attachments by clicking the attachments icon (the little clip) and then clicking "Add attachments...", and then link to them via the special `@attachment` token mentioned in the tutorial [1]. Or you could have an attachment wherever you want in the file system and link to it like you normally would inside Markdown.
i dislike the attachment solution since that is a vendor lockin and you were mentioning lack of that. if i use attachments and special virtual paths like "@attachment" i restricted from editing my notes with anything but your tool. ios is then obviously gone too. This defeats the purpose of being dropbox-syncable (or at least reduces its usefulness).
Well you don't have to use that if you don't want to.
The "@attachment" (and "@note") thing is actually pretty useless today, but it will solve a real problem tomorrow, namely: how do you make links always work even if the resource they are pointing to gets renamed? Which is worth solving IMHO.
Why would you need an attachment for this? Couldn't you 'refactor' the notes instead? Not sure that vendor lockin is worth it. The problem is worth solving but IMO you are going about it the wrong way.
You might be right, but it's not as simple at it sounds.
By using something like `@attachment/UUID` you don't have to refactor anything if the attachment gets renamed or modified. The somewhat unsolved issue there though is reliably keeping track of which UUID maps to which file.
If you're using regular links and rename an attachment, worst case scenario, you have to parse all notes, find all links pointing to the renamed attachment and update those, which can get expensive. Also regular path-based links can be a problem when you move the _note_ somewhere else too.
Plus how do you know something got renamed instead of the old attachment got deleted and a new one got created? This is partially a problem for the UUID-based approach too however.
Lastly what kind of link should you use to link to a note stored in another data directory? Relying on the absolute paths is too brittle, and it won't work at all when the app will also be able to run in the browser.
Genuine question: what, if anything, could a note-taking app do to assuage this fear?
e.g., is there something extreme that would help like giving you example notes to run through the export process during onboarding, or maybe even an automated export to an email every number of days so that if the app shuts down, even if you do nothing, you'll still have your data.
I'm asking because I recently launched an app in precisely this space (https://www.notefuel.com - it's a note-taking app dedicated specifically to learning, kind of like Readwise.io meets Evernote), and I totally understand this worry, have it myself, and would invest in mitigating it.
Nothing. To satisfy the programmer type users who claim their file type independence:
1. Just give the users a nice pdf export with lots of options.
2. iOS files integration , so that we can save directly into a repo program ( Ie working copy)
Can you give me an example of a repo program in this context - would that be something like Dropbox? So you'd have our app installed, it outputs to Files periodically, which in turn is syncing with Dropbox or some other service with file history functionality?
Yeah. I really like the beauty of the iOS Files api - it acts as a very convenient bridge.
So, supposing Dropbox has a sync with the files api, then that sync would be the responsibility (and implemented by) the Dropbox app. All you need to is ensure that you write into Files api properly (Ie don’t leave any locks around on files, etc - I’m not an iOS developer so I have no idea what’s actually required for very good/correct Files api interoperation, but it should be in Apple docs).
With a git repo program like Working Copy, you’d just write into its Files space (same as above for Dropbox), then Working Copy handles the syncing. Since Working Copy has no such auto sync as something like Dropbox would have, since WC is a git repo app and not a cloud files service, the user would manually open it themselves and make a commit and push it at their own choosing. Any writes to WC in the meantime will just overwrite. That’s all understood by the user , if he’s using a git repo as his files backup. I prefer manually syncing my files as commits to a repo, so this all works beautifully for me .
I don’t like placing the security of my synchronization in the hands of cloud files providers such as Dropbox or Google Drive. I use multiple iPads and laptops at once, so google drive and Dropbox bugs in sync may bite me. For notes this is best for me, since note update frequency of one to five times an hour doesn’t need any auto sync. But most users, even programmers, that I know don’t seem to enjoy this level of exactness.
> Ideally, notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years.
Personal opinion : I think this is not the right way to look at knowledge. What you think as "knowledge" today will only be data for algorithms in 10 years. Some knowledge today won't be useful in 5, 10 o 20 years from now.
The best way to validate knowledge is to share it and review it with peers as quickly as possible. Ideally, you would make your notes public and they would be easily findable by anyone, so anyone can continue your work at anytime.
Note taking for long term retrieval doesn't make sense in a world of internet and machine learning. In the future, you will just enter a question in a text box and algorithms will search inside billions of documents, deduce facts and write an essay to answer your question.
To me, note taking only makes sense for very short term "todo", or when to listening to someone speak. "Note taking" when reading a book is called "annotating", and they are training data for ML algorithms (not for your brain)
> Note taking for long term retrieval doesn't make sense in a world of internet and machine learning. In the future, you will just enter a question in a text box and algorithms will search inside billions of documents, deduce facts and write an essay to answer your question.
That is a narrow view of the reasons people take notes on books. One might want to save one's personal impressions of a piece of fiction, ideas about superficially unrelated concepts that suggest themselves, etc.
I agree. Note taking can be about identifying facts, interesting ideas or arguments but it can also be about arguing with the author, making links or recording your own understanding. The activity of taking notes, for me, is really about codifying your understanding of a section of text.
I'm torn between a pleasant UX and a portability/low bus-factor of the system I'm using. I don't take any long-term notes in LT though, just some quick ones from text books. I eventually plan to transcribe those somewhere else — still looking for the perfect app to use for the Zettelkasten method.
Check out if https://zettlr.com (FOSS, Markdown) could be useful to you - I know it specifically has some support for Zettelkasten, though I never was able to understand what this thing means.
yeah, I had the same issue and used a few markdown editors and landed on JOPLIN. Joplin has some good integration with online backups and semi-decent encryption setup.
notable was quite impressive until *(Notable was originally released as open-source but newer versions of it are no longer open-source.) and for apps I use often I try to keep them FOSS.
I got an iPad just to use LiquidText, back when I had to study for my PhD qualifying exam a few years ago. It has so many great UI affordances -- the way it shows search results, highlighted text, connections between notes and the text, the ability to easily see multiple parts of a document at the same time, and others. It made reading and studying textbooks an experience rivaling the real thing (and you don't have to lug them around). It was just what I needed to prepare, and I attribute a nontrivial fraction of why I passed the exam to having used LiquidText.
I don't really use it anymore, though. I use JabRef on my desktop to organize papers, and I haven't yet ironed out a workflow that incorporates LiquidText.
I would like to second the multiplatform suggestion. I want to be able to see my notes on any of my devices, not just Mac/ios, otherwise it's just not worth it to me.
Your software looks great! And I would happily fork over cash for it, but I need a Linux client ;)
1. My Dropbox folder of paper pdfs is a total mess, only made manageable because I use JabRef to open them. From within LiquidText, I have a hard time finding the papers I want. Being able to find papers again at all seems to be the main productivity boost in my math research right now, and JabRef has been great for that, even though it doesn't do fulltext search of the pdfs themselves. One important feature, here, is that JabRef helps me see papers in some historical context -- both when they were published and which other papers I was looking at when it was added to my bib file.
2. I consume lots of papers (but not necessarily in careful detail, making LT features potentially less useful), and I found the friction of having to import and manage the library within LiquidText to be a little too much for me, especially through a touch interface.
3. I like having multiple papers in front of me simultaneously. On my desktop, I tend to have multiple documents open across two monitors. I also like being able to use a physical keyboard and to have the precision of a mouse. It's nice that alt-tab (or command-backtick) is a nearly instantaneous operation.
4. Since I don't use my iPad, it tends not to be charged, leading to less use. It's also a model that can't use an Apple Pencil, so I haven't been incentivized to move all my note-taking and thinking to tablet computers.
I would really like a pdf document viewer like LiquidText for both MacOS and Linux. I put my e-mail address in for hearing about the MacOS version.
I also think that I should be using it more. I might just be lazy and not using the right tools.
By the way, Jofish was the one who recommended LiquidText to me. I forgot to also follow up on his advice to send you some immediate thoughts I had in 2016; I'm not sure they'd still be useful, but here they are anyway:
> LiquidText really is good, and it makes me (mostly) happy reading textbooks digitally. My only complaint is that with long books, say 500 pages, I have a hard time scrolling to an exact point because it becomes too sensitive, but I'm not really sure how that could be fixed (maybe a reader device which a hollowed out book you can open up to a particular page? or maybe pointier fingers?) Search-and-pinch is one of the main ways I skip around, though creating temporary comments works well, too. I find "finger-between-pages" double-scroll causes it to crash too often with Springer pdfs, so I've just avoided that feature. Maybe what characterizes LiquidText is that it doesn't disincentivize jumping back and forth between different parts of a book too much.
> Every once in a while, if I want to think of buying something, I click the "multi-doc" button to see the advertisement. Though eventually I'll probably give the LiquidText people money just to support them.
Wow, thanks for the great insights!
Re: 2. Very much agree, we have a "vision" for addressing this, but it'll take time.
Re: 3. Desktop apps coming! :)
Re: 4. Ahh, yeah, for iPad version, it really shines with Pencil.
And thanks for the 2016-era feedback. Some of that should be better now.
And honored to hear Jofish recommended us! LMK if you want in on any of our desktop betas.
Ok, grammar nazi alert. Who uses the word academical? I had to google it just to confirm it is indeed a word, albeit a rarely used one that is indistinguishable from the simpler, and in my opinion, the proper word, “academic”.
That is a category of non-native speaker that I hadn't considered until you mentioned it. A bot. Perhaps the author of this post, and the article I mentioned aren't human at all. They could be bots. Sorry for being robophobical. These are anxious times we are in.
I have the impression that most people in this thread are using LiquidText the wrong way. I use it on a daily basis and love it, but one has to know in what scenarios to use it. If you have to write lots of notes, don't use it. As much as I love the app, its note taking capabilities are not the best. Where LiquidText really shines is when one has to do deep research. I usually upload several papers around a similar topic to LiquidText, and keep the note section more for finding snippets of all the papers. Most of my best ideas came from using this app. All that said, I would love if the note taking part of LiquidText would be more similar to GoodNotes. Combining the pros of those two apps would be a killer app I'd be willing to pay on a monthly basis.
I tried LiquidText some time ago, as it looked well suited for the intense period of self-learning I was about to embark on. It was indeed very good overall, except for the lack of one essential feature, which was an absolute deal-breaker:
I can't search for my own notes.
The searches turn up everything in the texts written by others that you put into this app, but not the stuff you yourself write.
No serious learning from any non-trivial text is possible unless the learner can engage in a dialogue with the text. There are entire books and academic journals dedicated to marginalia and reader commentary through the centuries. I'm not going to use a piece of learning-related technology if it renders me completely unable to go back to my own thoughts on a subject, which I put work into.
For those wondering why there is all this discussion in these apps rather than just usingb vim or org mode; these apps mentioned here all are first-class-ink apps. (Trying to make the analogy to first-class-function PL’s).
So, here the discussion is on apps that have native ink support (for iOS, that would be via iPad and Apple Pencil).
So I guess they don’t have search because a majority of users use liquidtext primarily with inked notes or pasted inked notes from the clipboard. I guess text extraction is way harder of a problem to solve - hence no searching.
Text boxes are still very useful for title boxes and also detailed paragraphs of concentrated info - again, I used both of these in liquidtext but was immediately frustrated with even the lack of keyboard shortcuts for making text bold/underlined, changing sizes, or color. I did contact their support to request adding in keyboard shortcuts.. but instead they added in other more complicated features such as some weird inking mode switch. Hmmm adding in keyboard shortcuts for bold and changing size and color vs a switchable “inking”-mode .. surely the former is dead easy compared to the latter .....
To speak for myself, I don't care about ink. I don't even use Apple's pencil. I want to type things into a comment box and be able to search for what I typed later.
This app got started in 2012. It's 2020, and I can't.
Agreed. Searching in non ink should be a piece of cake. I suspect it’s been unimplemented for the same reason that my own request for keyboard shortcuts for bold/underline/change-size has been ignored - they don’t really care about user needs and only do the stuff they like. Which tells you something about the management of the product ...
My apologies for the unimplemented features! Please know it's not because we don't care, we have real-human tech support for even our free users because we desperately care. But we have to focus on the largest demand requests. Fwiw, the biggest request is desktop support, which are in beta now.
I really love this app on my iPad Pro. Very helpful way to make sense of many documents with overlapping data. I really wish it had (or integrated with) a good timeline app.
Thanks! We've thought about that. The next update will add some tagging features that won't solve that, but will get you partway to a solution to the timeline issue.
Epiphany WorkFlow isn't quite what you asked for, but I do believe you would find it a reasonable fit for your needs. Its output can go into Apple's Pages for final formatting, and it's free until Jan. 1, 2021. There after just $20 for a permanent copy. Disclosure: I wrote it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epiphany-workflow/id1490449900...
I admit that this looks like a bit of an ad, but I think it's fair use. If I offend anyone, I apologize.
You can export doc+notes as PDF, or export notes as a DOCX file. Uses iCloud Backup for backup, but dedicated solution coming probably this summer. Thanks for asking! (I'm founder @ LT)
1. The In-app-purchase gives you inking, linking by drawing lines, freeform excerpts, multiple documents in a single project, and more.
2. Sign-up required: no.
3. Does this require 3rd party servers: no, stores everything locally.
Happy to answer any other questions (I'm founder @ LT)!
Is there any way to export the data into a standard, editable file format? (Ideally something like markdown...)? I hate to build up a huge library of notes that are only usable in one piece of software...
It’s a nice concept but their devs have moved on and barely update it at all. Trivially small feature updates are spun as huge improvements , but only released every six months to a year (!).
For the same paradigm but with a much, much better user experience with constant quality of life upgrades and devs that actually spend full time job on it, use Margin Notes 3 (iOS).