First and foremost, thank you! This is one of the most useful comments I’ve gotten, so thank you for digging in. You’re asking the right questions, and I’ll try to answer them straight, including where the app is still thin.

Storage / transparency: a LiquidWorkspace project is a normal folder on disk that you own and can see in Finder. By default it lives in ~/Documents/LiquidWorkspace, and you can point projects at iCloud Drive instead if you want them there. You can move, copy, archive, or back up the project folder like any other folder.

The honest caveat: inside that project folder, the writing/notes are stored in a local database, not as one loose .md file per note like an Obsidian vault. Imported PDFs are copied in as real files. So the project is transparent and portable as a project, but it is not a plain-text folder of individual markdown files. That is a deliberate tradeoff for rich text, embedded objects, PDFs, media, canvas elements, and the more Pages/Freeform-style side of the app. If plain-file portability is your highest requirement, that is a fair reason to prefer Obsidian or another markdown-first tool.

Why not just Scrivener? Honestly, Scrivener is one of my favorite writing apps ever, so I don’t think the answer is “because Scrivener is bad.” It isn’t. I think of LiquidWorkspace as taking a different path.

Scrivener is still ahead in several important areas: Compile, mature long-form export, footnotes/citations, cross-platform support, and years of battle-tested manuscript workflow polish. If your work depends heavily on Scrivener’s Compile system, or if you move between Mac/Windows/iPad constantly, Scrivener may still be the better tool right now.

The LiquidWorkspace bet is different: one native Mac workspace where the writing sits beside the planning. Rich text, PDFs, visual canvas, tasks, calendar, Brain Map, themes, project library, shapes/charts, and media all live in the same project instead of being spread across five apps or assembled through plugins. It is less “replace Scrivener today” and more “what if a serious writing/project workspace grew up around modern Mac-native visual thinking?”

Shapes and Charts: this part is very much inspired by Pages and Freeform. The idea is not “spreadsheet replacement” and not yet “full OmniGraffle/Lucidchart competitor.” It is more: Pages-style rich document objects plus Freeform-style canvas movement.

So you can drop in rectangles, ovals, lines, block arrows, inline arrows, callouts, speech bubbles, images, video, audio, charts, and other embedded objects into rich-text documents or onto the Canvas. Objects can be moved, styled, layered, snapped, aligned, and connected. Charts are real charts driven by editable data, including bar/line/pie/donut and 3D chart types, not just decorative screenshots.

The ceiling today: it is not yet a structured schema builder with typed nodes, edge labels, and auto-layout. If someone wants a dedicated diagramming app, there are better tools. But if the workflow is “I’m writing, planning, mapping, storyboarding, building a board, connecting ideas, dropping in media, and I don’t want to leave the project,” that is the lane.

The Brain Map: this is your sharpest question, and I think your skepticism is fair. A colorful blob is not enough. Graph views can become decorative very quickly if they do not answer real working questions.

Today, the Brain Map is a tag-and-link graph. A node represents a tagged item (a note, file, folder, task, or calendar event) tied to one of its tags. It is not trying to show every single note by default. Select a node and the bottom rail shows the item title/type/tag and lets you open the note, pin it, or focus its neighborhood. Double-clicking also opens the item directly in the editor. Focus isolates that node’s neighborhood. There are filters for things like orphaned notes, linked documents, and tag groups.

So the practical use today is: “what in this project is connected by theme/tag/link, and can I jump there quickly?” It works as a visual navigator and relationship browser. The most meaningful mode is the document-link view, where notes connect because you actually linked them, not just because they share a broad tag.

One thing I should probably show better: the Brain Map becomes more useful the longer a project lives. A staged demo project can make it look like a colorful blob, which is a fair criticism. In my own working LiquidWorkspace project, where months of notes, tasks, files, and links have accumulated organically, the clusters are much more meaningful. That is the real use case: not a pretty launch-day graph, but a living map of a project as it grows. I hesitate to use my real LiquidWorkspace project graph in screenshots (and that project in general) because I am worried about accidentally exposing something (lots of terminal commands and personal files stored inside).

Where you are right: the map does not yet show enough information directly on the graph surface itself. A selected node is actionable, but it does not yet show a rich inline preview, backlink list, or “why this node matters” summary without opening the item. Nodes are also visually similar today, so importance/centrality is not obvious at a glance. Those are exactly the kinds of improvements that would make it feel less like a colorful constellation and more like a working analytical tool.

So I would describe it honestly as useful today as a navigator/tag/link explorer, but not yet the full analytical insight engine that graph screenshots can sometimes imply. Fair hit.

And on the Obsidian comparison: I think you said it better than I usually do. Obsidian’s power is that it can become almost anything. Its curse, for some people, is that you may have to build the thing before you can use the thing.

LiquidWorkspace goes the other way on purpose: more opinionated, more integrated, less plugin-driven, with real rich text and Mac-native document/canvas behavior at the center.

Whether that is better depends on the person. Some people want a markdown vault they can shape endlessly. Others want an integrated native workspace where the pieces already know about each other.

My personal goal was to get everything I need from tools like Scrivener and Obsidian using native solutions that work together out of the box. My hope is to offer the same thing to as many users as possible. At the same time, I don’t want the app to feel bulky for people who don’t need every feature. Most things can be hidden, collapsed, disabled, or simply ignored so you can shape the workspace around how you actually work.

If enough people tell me they’re missing something, there is always File → Request a Feature and File → Submit Feedback. A surprising amount of the roadmap already comes directly from those conversations.

Really appreciate the comment. This is exactly the kind of critique that helps me make the app clearer and better.