Liquid gives you commands to enable you to be more productive by making all your text powerfully interactive, letting you work at the speed of thought, satisfying even the most fleeting curiosity in an instant. It works in conjunction with almost any macOS application, particularly the Author word processor and the Reader PDF viewer.
How it Works
To see how fast Liquid makes you, first consider how you currently perform a basic text operation such as looking text up in Wikipedia (or any online resource).
First you select the text you want to work with, then:
Standard Interaction: Copy the textGo to your web browserClick on the location bar or cmd-lType in the URL www.wikipedia.orgHit enterLocate the search field on WikipediaClick for focusPaste the textHit enterThe Liquid Way: Keyboard shortcutType two characters
In detail: Let's say you select the text 'Liquid seriously speeds up your workflow'. You first need to do the keyboard shortcut to summon Liquid (by default ⌘@ but it's easily customizable to ⌘space) and Liquid opens with your text copied across, ready for action:
You can now click on menu categories (such as 'References'), or for more speed use the keyboard shortcuts which are indicated next to the commands: For example next to References you'll see (R) and once 'r' is activated you can do (W) which is the shortcut for Wikipedia, as will be shown to the right of Wikipedia.
“Get used to it & you're hooked”
Stephen Fry actor, writer, national icon
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Update for Version 26
You can now copy text straight into the Apple Notes application under Copy to / Notes.
Compared with Spotlight
Spotlight, particularly Spotlight in Yosemite, is very powerful, however Spotlight does not work on selected text and Spotlight guesses what you want to do, which is often great, but sometimes just wrong.
Using Flow takes just one second for an even moderately familiar user compared to the usual 10 seconds. Is this really a big difference? In reality it feels like the difference between playing a modern computer game on a high spec computer, versus stumbling along with lag and this is the difference between being in flow and being frustrated, except with text on your Mac you don't know how frustrating it feels without Liquid since you haven't tried it with Liquid yet.
Remember that when it comes to interaction, higher speed is not just an improvement, it changes the medium: Look at slightly different images 24 times a second and it's no longer just a sequence of still images, it's a movie.
I really don't know how else to explain it but please have a look at the demo video above, read the reviews below and ideally try it yourself. Douglas Rushkoff goes so far as to say that “This counts as Mac OS Eleven”. Which is nice.
In less than one second you can do much of what you do every day. The result is that you expand your reach and deepen your grasp of the information which matters in your life.
Doug Engelbart
Doug has been the inspiration for all this work and in some ways the Liquid command bar is the reverse of his NLS/Augment interactions. Here I am showing him the precursor to Liquid, a plugin to Firefox called Hyperwords:
Commands
Liquid features the following commands and works in all modern macOS applications:
Search
References
Convert
Translate (In-App Upgrade)
Copy
Share (In-App Upgrade)
Localisations
Liquid is localised for Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Romanian, Russian and Turkish. So far. Liquid is free and features an optional low priced in-app upgrade to enable Translation and Custom Search functions.
Reviews
Macworld UK Liquid is highly recommended.
https://www.macworld.com/article/2065612/liquid-review-utility-simplifies-many-text-related-tasks.html
Mashable Upgrades your entire macOS system into a seamless work machine.
https://mashable.com/2013/06/13/plugins-extensions-procrastination/?europe=true#eCBa2o1hkEqy
Wired Information wants to be Liquid ... Doug Engelbart refers to Hegland's project as "the next stage of the web."
https://www.wired.com/2005/01/information-wants-to-be-liquid/
The Next Web Lets you find amazing context to every word on the Internet.
https://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/10/19/liquid-information-lets-you-find-amazing-context-to-every-word-on-the-internet/
Cult Of Mac Liquid Helps Information Flow Smoothly.
https://www.cultofmac.com/199694/liquid-helps-information-flow-smoothly-review/
LifeHacker Speeds up transferring text between apps, searching, translating, and more.
MacUser Revolutionary. 5/5 Mice
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BBC So useful you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
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CNN A great tool.
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MEVVY Increase productivity and improve your workflow.
(link expired)
TUAW One of those utilities that you can't live without once you start using it.
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App Store Reviews (global, end of 2018)
© Frode Hegland 2020