Liquid author

“It features a wonderful tool that remembers every piece of text that you cut”

There are many minimalist writing apps on the market, each distinguishing themselves from the likes of Pages, Microsoft Word and Libre Office by adopting an uncluttered interface, thereby allowing users to primarily concentrate on their text.

Liquid | Author is one of them, and, on face value at least, there’s very little to it. Here you have a clean writing environment footed by a word count, a Find button and an option to switch between read and edit views. But, as the user guide handily points out the first time you open the app, it offers more than enough depth without proving to be a distraction. Indeed, Author has an abundance of features, the latest of which – for version 4.0 – is a wonderful tool that remembers every piece of text that you cut. When you subsequently press Command+shift+v each chunk is listed, allowing them to be pasted anywhere with ease. That comes on top of a recently added ability to save to Wordpress and the addition of In-document Links, showing the developers like to keep on top of this ever-impressive package.

There is much to admire. When you’re reading documents (the screen turning a cold white) you’re able to tap the spacebar to scroll. In editing mode (where the screen is a warmer light yellow), pinching the trackpad – should you have one – collapses the document into its outline. All of this can be had for free, but if you wish to export to PDF, Word, Plain Text and RTF – together with any citations you assign and a cover page – it requires a one-off in-app purchase.

Verdict

Liquid | Author secretly puts all of the features you need from a writing package within reach while letting you focus on being creative.