Liquid | Author
Stripped–down writing with an academic bent
Free (IAPs) From Liquid Information Company, liquid.info Needs macOS 10.13 or later
Writers are famed for their ability to mess around instead of actually writing, and the rise of the writing app has been a procrastinating writer’s dream: we’ve lost days distracting ourselves by messing around with distraction–free writing apps. Will Liquid | Author stop us messing around and make us actually get down to business? Er, no. But it’s interesting nevertheless.
Let’s start with what Liquid | Author doesn’t do. It doesn’t offer a sidebar containing your documents: it’s a single– window app that can open multiple files in Safari–style tabs. It doesn’t have themes or templates, just dark mode and a switch between white and sepia backgrounds to indicate if you’re reading or editing. It doesn’t support lots of formatting styles, and while there’s a word count there’s no character count or other reading statistics. And if you don’t pay for it, it doesn’t export or print either: the free app is just for you to experiment with, and upgrading is a perfectly reasonable $5.99. That unlocks not just exporting to PDF, RTF, and plain text, but also publishing to WordPress. Have the separate Liquid | Flow app installed too? Then you can also share to Medium.
What Liquid | Author does do, and does very well, is get out of your way. Tap Esc to go into full screen and you’re in a simple writing environment with effective tools for adding references, citations, images, links, and YouTube videos. It also has a very good clipboard manager that remembers everything you cut, enabling you to select individually cut bits to paste (but not bits from within those sections: for example if you’ve cut a paragraph, you can’t paste just part of it — it’s all or nothing). When you’re exporting a document the app automatically adds a cover page and a references or citations section, and it correctly formats the citations in either brackets or superscript.
Liquid | Author is good at what it does, but we’re struggling to think of who might need it. It lacks the power (and price tag) of Ulysses; it’s not as intuitive or as flexible as Bear; and it doesn’t have the typography or tools of iA Writer. It’s a very specialized app for a very specific kind of writing.
the bottom line. Liquid | Author is well executed and good for academic writing, but somewhat limited. Carrie Marshall