Muse: designing a studio for ideas | Hacker News Reader

Muse: designing a studio for ideas

inkandswitch.com

137 pointswalterbell18 comments

Starting to feel the fact Apple decided tablets should be siloed from traditional computing is really just starting to hurt development in these areas.

There is some great work here but also you see things like the web clipper, it's already accepting that research web browsing is best done on a computer so then because of the tablet silo they need to create custom tech and run servers just to get the content from two devices next to each other. If Apple had a tablet Macbook you'd just be dragging and dropping from the browser to Muse.

When Microsoft launched their Surface line, I and many others joked that is was the wrong direction but as the years pass it's starting to feel more and more absurd to me that my tablet workspace and my workstation workspace are two incompatible operating systems.

If Apple hadn't been so strict and had a laptop line similar to the Surface as well as the iPad, does anyone seriously think anyone would be pursuing software like this in the locked down tablet OS when they could be doing both streams of work on the one device instead.

to follow on, the fear has always been that macos/osx would become more tablet-like vs ios becoming more mac-like. I don't think the convergence has been as bad as some predicted, it does feel like it's gone more in the mac->ios route than the other way around.

This year will bring iOS apps to macOS.

In the next few years, there is a planned shift of MacBooks from x86 to Arm CPUs.

> There is some great work here but also you see things like the web clipper, it's already accepting that research web browsing is best done on a computer so then because of the tablet silo they need to create custom tech and run servers just to get the content from two devices next to each other.

Clipping is needed at the point of discovery, which today may include social media, which is often consumed on mobile.

DevonThink has a mature clipper and search engine on macOS and iOS. It enables fast archiving of links, HTML, PDFs and audio files on phones, tablets and desktops, with multi-device sync via WebDAV, iCloud and other backends. It works very well, especially as Google's search index continues to shrink.

I agree with your thoughts on siloing being a poor decision by Apple, but I see nothing here that couldn’t already be done all on device using existing APIs.

Apple already added drag & drop between apps, you can drag text/images from safari straight into notes (or any app that implements drag/drop.) The web clipper could be implemented as a safari extension and work in a nearly identical way.

Agree with this comment.

It also (superficially) appears they haven’t studied deeper (more academic, research or UX driven) prior art. It’s easy to beat Preview or PDF Expert. Harder to surpass the more innovative examples.

In particular, there’s a lot of depth in Liquid Text:

https://www.liquidtext.net

But also a couple of the infinite canvas note anything apps, especially ones that also bring in audio recording or other ‘mixed media’ while covering swaths of the thinking outlined here.

Finally, there’s an irony that all the video embeds on this article are disabled on my iPad Pro. Do they even iPad?

They mention Liquid Text being an inspiration

Sorta related: yesterday I was on the phone attempting to communicate with a colleague and I looked through my messages for a link on my phone. Unthinkingly I hit copy, on my phone, and then opened up his email on my Mac and hit paste.

It worked.

So many Apple is starting to figure all of this out?

It's called Continuity: https://www.apple.com/macos/continuity/

I'm not an Apple user, but it seems nice.

I am in completely favour of spatial solutions, but sooner or later you hit the problem that the graph of associations don't map well to 2D unless you denormalize it (like in databases). Which just means if you want to reference an item in multiple places you have to duplicate them and you loose the link between them.

The solution for Muse would be to not put the item in the drawer but the whole area around it as well. Then when you paste it back somewhere you create a wormhole in the space that shows the original place now in a different context. This way you can keep the intuitive zooming and panning and see duplicated areas that update properly.

To be fair there are already some ways they try to solve this with their point style wormholes or the "expand and edit content on the drawer" interaction, but I think they should fully embrace that thought space is not linear.

MindScope on iOS allows an item to be duplicated in different trees, enabling multiple entry points to the children of that item.

EccoPro (20+ year old Windows app, still functional) also allows an item (and children) to appear in multiple categories/folders.

My simple(r), free, no ads, alternative: Idea Growr https://ideagrowr.com

Focus is mostly on the first stage of capturing all your ideas, and growing them using question sets. I've partnered with my employer to turn IdeaGrowr into a more rounded app, with accounts, etc.

If you're interested, I'm writing about the progress over here: https://medium.com/idea-growr

I'll have to look into Muse more, but it seems very tablet focused. It seems more focused on the stage where you have the idea and are working out the details, research, etc. Can you use it to quickly jot down an idea in the middle of the night?

I like the 'draw on pictures' part. I use the Concepts app for iPad for that.

On Android, the NoteLynx outliner app allows an item to have multiple parents. It's good for cross-linking notes in multiple contexts.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrodean....

> partnered with my employer

What a great idea! More companies should encourage employees to work on creative projects, and partner up on promising products.

Incredible work on this article! Its the dream mixture of a non linear idea processor like prezi for presentations mixed with the perfect webclipped + pdf + notebook! I am awe of the thoroughness of this concept.

How long have you been working on this work of art?

Reminds me of Microsoft's old Courier concept (remember that?)

Great article and slick UX! Is any of this Open Source?

Some of their preceding work is open-source, including Capstone, a stylus-enabled ChromeOS app, https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript.html

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