HN user
adamwiggins.com | cofounder Muse, Ink & Switch, Heroku
Elicit | San Francisco + remote | https://elicit.com/careers
Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses language models to help researchers figure out what’s true and make better decisions, starting with common research tasks like literature review.
Front-end engineer: https://elicit.com/careers?ashby_jid=b5e218b8-8730-4254-b026...
Senior software engineer: https://elicit.com/careers?ashby_jid=aa99e2e9-5b15-4cd3-ac9d...
I'll join the chorus here and say that Turbo Pascal was my stepping stone from beginner tinkering (BASIC on Apple II and DOS) to professional development with C. The dev environment was the perfect mix of "serious and you can make real stuff including compiled executables for distribution" with approachability for a relative beginner.
Our team's experience has been the exact opposite: Catalyst let us create a beautiful, fully-native Mac app[1] that shares the bulk of its code with its iPad counterpart. A few bumps here and there but overall a good experience.
Heroku pivoted from an online code editor (or "FileMaker Pro for the web") to a git-based development platform.
Ok, fair critiques. We obviously see many things differently (e.g. software being static vs requiring maintenance) so probably not much value in arguing further. But in /r/changemyview parlance I'll award you a partial delta. :)
In that case you'd still have full access to your documents.
In keeping with local-first values the complete and canonical dataset resides on your devices (Macs/iPads). Sync service outage or total shutdown would result in your no longer being able to sync between devices, but all the devices would have whatever data they had at time the service went offline, and you can continue to make local edits until the end of time.
You can test this out: just put some stuff into Muse, then turn off your wifi / go into airplane mode / shut off the network in some other way. Keep working with your data and watch the sync indicator; it will show that you have a lot of unsynced changes, but never will your ability to work be interrupted.
Changing while you write sounds surprising. All ink engines have some amount of retroactive smoothing going on, but typically (and this is the same for Muse) it should only be the last 50ms or so of data, and often that part is still hidden by your hand or stylus tip.
Example handwriting in Muse: https://media.museapp.com/website/2022/how/write.webp -- sounds like you're not getting results like this?
If you feel like it, send a screen recording to hello@museapp.com and we can try to debug potential problems in the smoothing algorithm.
In a word, latency. Everything feeling responsive and tactile is a part of the (tablet part) of the Muse experience. You can see the latency tests for various tablets in a table partway through the essay, and compare those to the human factors research and see that they are off by an order of magnitude for what's necessary to feel responsive. But those tests were a few years ago, would not be surprised if things have improved since then.
TBH I'm not really thrilled about being locked into iPad+Pencil either. But so far, Apple is the only one that has been able to cross the latency threshold with their hardware and OS. Hoping that will not be the case forever.
Also on the (very long) list of things we want to build. It's more challenging design- and technology-wise than you might imagine, due to the canvas model and relatively arbitrary content folks can bring in. (Actually realizing this will be a good topic to discuss in a future podcast episode.)
I'll add to Wulf's note that we on the team are privacy-conscious, listen to us talk about it here: https://museapp.com/podcast/18-privacy/
We designed the architecture to allow full Signal-style e2ee, but given that there are only two engineers on this we had to cut scope on that for the first release. Now we'll be listening to what our customers ask for in terms of where to prioritize in the roadmap. We have quite a few medical professionals and attorneys using Muse in their professional lives, so we've already heard from some of them on this topic.
Indeed. Victor's work is the gateway drug to tools-for-thought; it certainly was for me. Read at your own peril, the rabbit hole goes very deep :-)
Yes, we're curious to see how pure desktop usage evolves. A big part of the whole "thinking workspace" concept is the more relaxed posture of tablet use, the ability to scribble on things, etc.
That said, I've used Muse for Mac heavily for the past six months and find it's strongest when I am doing more text-oriented work. I'll also be curious to see how people use in practice and whether the value prop is really all your devices used in tandem (desktop, tablet, phone) or whether there are strong uses cases for just one at a time.
Thanks for the review. Agree with most of your points here, briefly:
iPhone app is just capture right now, intended for "I just had this thought that I need to muse on later." We don't market it much because it's so limited. Future version will build on the sync infrastructure to offer better capture and ability to look up stuff on your boards.
Board rename on Mac is a quick fix we squeezed in before launch. Will make that nicer soon.
Anchoring boards to the top left explained a bit here: https://museapp.com/memos/2021-03-flex-boards/ -- but has the tradeoffs you mention if you want extra space in the left and top.
OneNote is pretty great actually, ahead of its time. It does still have the "big list of documents" element and in general has the Microsoft level of design polish, which is to say, not much. So certainly our target market with Muse is folks that prefer something better-crafted and from a small/indie team. But that only emphasizes the importance of those fit-and-finish bits you mentioned. Now that our sync engine is finally out in the world we can spend time iterating on that.
Yes, we do need some way to link/embed/transclude documents between applications. OLE was one failed attempt, OpenDoc is another (in)famous example. This is something we're researching at Ink & Switch, but will be hard to innovate here without OS-level support.
Anyhow thanks for taking the time to kick the tires. I will happily take "Muse is awesome but could be more awesome" as validation of the work we've done so far, and motivation to keep improving.
Much appreciated. Sharing the journey is a big part of what has made this project fulfilling.
As another commenter pointing out, the Mac app alone is somewhat limited without the iPad as a kind of ink/annotation accessory--but I'm curious to see if people get use out of it. There are plenty of desktop-focused spatial canvas apps (Scapple and Miro come to mind) so clearly there's potential for utility here.
We researched the name heavily as part of registering our trademark. There are hundreds of hardware/software/internet products and services that use the word "muse" in their name somewhere--and that's true for almost any other single english word or even combination of words.
The practical reality of naming things online in this age is that you try to avoid obvious collisions e.g. don't name your photo editing app Photochop, don't name your computer company Newton's Apple. But there's not a lot of risk of customer confusion between different domains like music sequencer vs thinking workspace.
I'm a big believer in tools that make us feel good about our work. Pretty handwriting as an output is in that category.
You'd be surprised how much engineering goes into point simplification, bezier smoothing, etc. One of our team members, Adam Wulf, has worked extensively in this space and even open-sourced a lot of the results: https://adamwulf.me/open-source/
...but point remains that we can make the inking experience better in Muse. It's on our list to work on.
Text formatting (possibly Markdown) for sure. Code highlighting is something I would personally like but depends on how many software engineers decide to become members. Latex is probably out for its complexity, but in the long run some kind of plugins system might make it possible.
Best bet here is web apps like https://kinopio.club/
Evernote is a good example of software that I think had a lot of promise but has decayed in quality and performance over time.
No self-hosted sync service at the moment. At the moment we've got our hands full with making it work well in a production setting. But I'd like to see a world where generic sync services (either as hosted services or self-hosted) is commonplace.
if I stop paying for sync, I still have my notes and a fully functional product
The same is true for Muse. When your membership expires (or you cancel it) the app reverts to free mode, which allows you to read, copy, and export all your data. But if you're over the free card limit then you can't create new content.
That said I have total respect for the Obsidian model. They're really successful for very good reason.
local-first sync can easily support multiple schemes and let old versions run without overhead to devs
I'd love that. Ink & Switch has done extensive research on how to enable this with p2p technology etc. Our industry isn't there yet... but lots of good folks are working on it. The Muse sync setup is a step in that direction.
As a developer, I don't want to deal with infrastructure for an app. It's a massive headache to have 24/7/365 responsive system. I want to make apps, not be on-call sysadmin.
Oh yes. I spent many years carrying a pager for Heroku's infrastructure. Part of the appeal of local-first is the sync infrastructure is necessary to transmit data between devices, not for every single keystroke or gesture the user makes.
A core concept is the idea that creative professionals live a multi-device life. Desktop computer for focused productivity, tablet for relaxed reading and thinking, phone for capture and lookup on the go.
I get your metaphor, but I think it falls down because "write once, deploy anywhere" was a slogan for Java and it never really fulfilled that promise.
And yes, like anything in life there are top-quality options which tend to be more expensive and lower-quality options which fit a smaller budget. MindNode is a lovely app and worth paying for IMO.
We do have a rudimentary search via OS integration already: https://museapp.com/handbook/ipad/#to-search
But yes, this is due for improvement / upgrade and is on our roadmap.
I'm a big fan of text files--my "thinking workspace" for over a decade was a folder full of .txt and .md files and vim. But as more of my reference material and creative inputs are images, PDFs, websites, etc that became limiting.
We evaluated all the major tablet platforms including Android and Chromebook a few years back[1], and found all of them lacking on hardware or OS capabilities in a way that would prevent build software like Muse.
Hoping things have changed since then or will change in the future. I feel like touch as a platform is too important to be so dominated by one vendor.
Obsidian is great, and they are similarly priced to us ($10/mo for sync).
We felt that local-first sync is a core feature of the product, and to exclude free users from that would be leaving out a huge amount of the value. So we opted to include it for everyone, but limit the amount you can store.
You might want to read the original post--a core feature you're paying for is local-first sync, which is explicitly designed to solve a lot of the problems with iCloud.
I do want to see a world where there is a generic syncing service (maybe AWS can run one, but open standards / open source) similar to Dropbox or iCloud. I can pay one lump sum for all my storage and all my apps will connect through it. But so far no such thing exists outside of the crude file-based syncing of Dropbox, and that's not suitable for building realtime apps on top of.
Yeah, truly an unsolved problem. Obsidian seems to have found a good path--free for the core product, $10/mo (standard price for prosumer apps) for sync.
But we felt like sync is a core feature and we really want to give it away for free so that people can experience it. Time will tell if that was a good call.
OCR is one we've investigated but it's tricky to find the right API that is compatible with our local-first values. One customer tipped us off that the creators of Nebo have an interesting one. So we'll look into that.
Lots of folks use Muse together with Roam, Obsidian, or LogSeq just using standard OS tools like drag-and-drop. LogSeq example: https://twitter.com/itsjustmath/status/1527410705820839937
But I think there's a lot more we could do here with deeper integration--deep bidirectional links etc.
Thanks! Yes, CRDTs are risky in the sense that they are computer science that is only just at the edge of what's possible in software today. A few folks have put them into practice in small ways (Figma comes to mind) but I wouldn't recommend it for most software projects.
That said I hope we (meaning everyone working on CRDTs and local-first) can help make it suitable for production use and perhaps it will be a common, maybe even standard, way to build software five or ten years from now. That's my hope/dream, at least.