Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

liquidtext.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#11

Post by tduberne »

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.

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#12

Post by helloworm »

dsabanin wrote: post #9
helloworm wrote: post #7

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 fon…

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.

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#13

Post by phren0logy »

helloworm wrote: post #7

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 fon…

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.

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#14

Post by notefuel »

tduberne wrote: post #11

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://zettelk…

I 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 - 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.

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#15

Post by fabiospampinato »

tduberne wrote: post #11

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://zettelk…

> No app can offer that kind of guarantee.

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.

[1] https://notable.md

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#16

Post by helloworm »

notefuel wrote: post #14
tduberne wrote: post #11

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://zettelk…

I 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 r…

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)

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#17

Post by helloworm »

phren0logy wrote: post #13
helloworm wrote: post #7

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 fon…

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).

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#18

Post by notefuel »

helloworm wrote: post #16
notefuel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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 r…

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?

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#19

Post by dmortin »

tduberne wrote: post #11

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://zettelk…

> 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

Emacs + Org Mode

You can be sure Emacs will still be around in 20 years and Org Mode stores notes in text format.

Re: LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking

#20

Post by jpmattia »

dmortin wrote: post #19
tduberne wrote: post #11

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://zettelk…

> 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 Emacs + Org Mode You can be sure Emacs will still be around in 20 years and Org Mode stores notes in text format.

If only I could figure out a way of scribbling with the iPadPro pen and get it into org mode.
Post reply on HN