Learn More

Background

LiquidText gives students and knowledge workers better ways to annotate, navigate, visualize and understand the things they have to read.
Our LiquidText software is a multi-touch document manipulation system that provides a uniquely flexible environment for active
reading — the focused, critical reading we do when we highlight, annotate, flip between pages, compare documents, etc.

LiquidText is built on peer-reviewed research, thoroughly tested, and validated with users. Our first product release is under development
and we expect to make it available for the iPad later this year.

LiquidText System

To provide this more flexible, fluid way to interact with documents, we developed a high degree-of-freedom user interface, where
the reader can freely and precisely control both the visual representation and the navigational structures of their content.

What this means is that things that used to be hard, like comparing several sections of a long text, creating annotations
that refer to many parts of a text at once, or aggregating your annotations together without losing their context, are now easy.

To learn more about the ideas and motivation behind LiquidText, see our research.
To see the system in action, watch the demos!

Core Interactions

Collapse

This lets you pinch a document together to see disparate sections at once,
or to hide irrelevant content.

Excerpts

You can easily pull content excerpts out of the main document, but they always retain a link back to their source so you never lose their context.

Connect

Join excerpts, comments, and documents freely and flexibly to create groupings, outlines, or whatever organization you need.

Fisheye

Zoom out to get an overview, and use the fisheye zoom to magnify–without distorting the text–just the areas of interest. Rotate or pinch the lens as you move it to change its zoom factor or size.

Comment

Create comments that point to as many pieces of text as you like, in one or more documents. Then leave the comments on the document or aggregate them together–they still will retain the link to their referrents.

Aggregate

Aggregation mode lets you quickly collapse the document so only the highlights are visible, and lets you easily control what parts are collapsed and how much surrounding context is shown–all with a simple hand gesture.

Link

Arbitrarily and easily link pieces of text to one-another, letting you create your own paths through your documents.

Bimanually

Manipulate multiple objects or controls at once using both hands, keeping things easy and efficient.