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LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking
- davidcollantes 7y agoWhat do the in-app purchases provide? Is there a sign up required? Does this requires/stores data on a third party server?
- craigst 7y ago1. 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)!
- spott 7y agoIs 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...
- craigst 7y agoYes, even in the free version, export as PDF (higher fidelity), or export notes as an outline in DOCX for easy editing in Word.
- phren0logy 7y agoI 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.
- craigst 7y agoThanks! 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.
- dang 7y agoPosted as a Show HN in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401550
- jxy 7y agoThe usual questions go: 1. How do I export or backup the data? 2. How do I use the data when the app dies?
- maxrmk 7y agoLooks really cool! I'm going to see if I can get into the beta, then give it a shot.
- helloworm 7y agoIt’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).
- dsabanin 7y agoI 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?
- helloworm 7y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- steipete 7y agoLiquidText is powered by the PSPDFKit PDF SDK! https://pspdfkit.com/ https://pspdfkit.com/
- tduberne 7y agoI 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 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.
- notefuel 7y agoI think this is very common. 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 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.
- helloworm 7y agoNothing. 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)
- notefuel 7y agoCan 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?
- kmill 7y agoI 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.
- craigst 7y agoCan I ask why you don't use it anymore? (I'm founder at LT) Anything we could do to make it more of a post-school app for you as well?
- kmill 7y agoHere are a few things I can think of: 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. (I did end up paying for some extra features.)
- cac1 7y agoIt looks very useful for projects of relatively limited scope. Of course I'm biased. I wrote Epiphany WorkFlow for the Mac. It's similar but more practical for larger projects and it's free (for now).
- throwaway72v2 7y agoI 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.
- helloworm 7y agoFor 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 .....
- throwaway72v2 7y agoTo 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.
- jtth 7y agoI like LiquidText. But I couldn't really do anything with the notes, so I stopped using it. I would pay $200 a year for something on iOS/MacOS that combined Tinderbox and LiquidText and let me set formatting for export.
- cac1 7y agoEpiphany 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?mt=12 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.
- craigst 7y agoCan you tell me what about the notes in LT made it hard to use them? We're hoping to make the app better. (I'm founder @ LT)
- 29athrowaway 7y agoAdd "for iPhone and iPad" to the title please.
- craigst 7y agoIt's in beta for PC now! (I'm founder @ LT)
- 29athrowaway 7y agoAll PC operating systems? You mean I can get it for BSD or Linux?
- craigst 7y agoSorry...I should've been clearer. PC-Windows only. :( But Web version is planned to come in the future.
- anigbrowl 7y agoLooks awesome but iPad-only? Come on.
- O_H_E 7y agoWindows in Beta testing, and looks like macOS is in some kind of Alpha.
- cjamesd 7y agoNitpick on the title used for this post: academical is not a word.
- kmill 7y agoIt isn't? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/academical https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/academical https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/academical https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/acad... https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/academical https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/academical
- chrismmay 7y agoAcademically speaking, yes it is a word. On the other hand, it's not being used correctly in this context, which makes it ironical.
- saul_goodman 7y agoiPad and iPhone only? Really?
- craigst 7y agoYes, but desktop versions are coming. We're testing Windows in beta now! (I'm founder @ LT)
- chrismmay 7y agoOk, 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”. A bit like saying “that’s nonsensical” vs “that’s nonsense’. https://wikidiff.com/academic/academical https://wikidiff.com/academic/academical
- helloworm 7y agoWhy be so polemical?
- chrismmay 7y agoI know, I’m insufferableical. I need a vacationical.
- YaxelPerez 7y agomaybe a non-native english speaker
- chrismmay 7y agoProbably. The irony is palpableical. Reminds me of this article I read recently. I could understand it, but it was like reading a foreign language https://www.google.com/amp/s/thedigitalwise.com/2020/03/14/asteroid-alert-nasa-confirms-two-asteroids-will-be-intersecting-earths-orbit-coming-week/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/thedigitalwise.com/2020/03/14/a....
- artificial 7y agoThis is fantastical. What's the deal with the writing? Right now by bots for bots?
- chrismmay 7y agoThat 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.
- irwt 7y agoI 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.