LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking
liquidtext.net
liquidtext.net
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).
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.
I think it's important for this minority to be vocal to be noticed, so I'm doing my part.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Emacs + Org Mode
You can be sure Emacs will still be around in 20 years and Org Mode stores notes in text format.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.)
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.
Your software looks great! And I would happily fork over cash for it, but I need a Linux client ;)
Best of luck
A bit like saying “that’s nonsensical” vs “that’s nonsense’. https://wikidiff.com/academic/academical
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.
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 .....
This app got started in 2012. It's 2020, and I can't.
I would pay $200 a year for something on iOS/MacOS that combined Tinderbox and LiquidText and let me set formatting for export.
I admit that this looks like a bit of an ad, but I think it's fair use. If I offend anyone, I apologize.
1. How do I export or backup the data?
2. How do I use the data when the app dies?
Happy to answer any other questions (I'm founder @ LT)!
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).