1,633 karma · joined August 3, 2007
We wanted to start with getting the single-user experience completely right, but Miro-like collaboration is on the roadmap.
However I'm curious: do you apply this same criteria when trying software like Notion, Figma, or Google Docs? I assume you have different criteria based on whether the software is downloaded to your local device or not, but would love to understand why that's so.
There are some design discussions on the emacs mailing list about the tradeoff between accessibility and power tool that might be relevant: https://lwn.net/Articles/819452/
It's a whole new ballgame in the mobile era though. People have been trained to dismiss an app if they can't figure it out in 10 seconds of use.
Mark and I talked about that on this podcast about our love of manuals, so maybe that's a start: https://museapp.com/podcast/3-read-the-fabulous-manual
Web pages (including subsets) also a critical card type on our roadmap.
You're right that portrait mode is clumsy right now. We will fix this for sure--it's a challenging technical and design problem due to the spatial model.
I view note-taking (apps, or just on paper) as being about capture and later retrieval. But in a pretty static way--you take notes from a meeting, later you read them to remind yourself. Knowledge bases like wikis are more powerful version of this data in, data out mechanism.
Muse is about thinking. That means: pulling together a huge number of sources, arranging, culling, finding patterns, having insights. Which can then lead to a creative work (like a book or a piece of software) or a decision (like making managerial decisions as a startup founder or team lead).
Hope to hear how your journey with the iPad (and Muse) turns out :-)
And good point about monthly vs yearly perception.
Heavy dogfooding, yes! I use Muse for absolutely everything in designing, planning, and thinking about strategy for our company and product. Can't imagine my life without it after a year of using the product.
- You can use the trial for unlimited time, and many folks do.
- We've tried onboarding that includes sample boards, but this tends to be confusing because it's someone else's thoughts rather than your own.
- There is a learning curve--we like tools take a bit of time investment, but one that will pay off with power and flexibility in the long run. vim and emacs were two inspirations here. https://museapp.com/handbook
Muse works great with pinch, scroll, etc gestures. We still need to work on pointer hover states. Other things you're missing in the app trackpad support, or just making a general case of its importance?
Now whether the product is helpful enough with those things to be worth the price, well for that the market will decide :-)
We have quite a few paying customers, and I think they'd say it's worth it because it helps them think and be creative in a way that no other tool does.
But obviously that's a decision that's up to each person, and we offer a free tier so you can find out for yourself.
Happily we're a small team, so we only need a few thousand customers at this price to make it sustainable.
I actually see the price as being the other way around from what you're describing: perhaps compare to the Tesla Roadster.
Start with a premium product to fund your fledgling business, people who really believe in the mission (and have the cash for it) can support it. Then over time, you get economies of scale and can lower the price to reach a wider audience.
We're incredibly thankful to our early customers for helping us fund this business without needing to rely on big VC funding. They're backing us because they believe in better software.
Notability is a great app, but it's a sketchbook so not really a comparison.
Subscription fatigue, yeah, I know. Hoping to write an article about this in our industry, but the reality is that this is what's sustainable for a small team that wants to avoid venture funding (and eventual acquisition "incredible journey" stuff) or monetizing by selling your personal data.
A trackpad-driven mode can be nice when you're using it with a keyboard for a lot of text entry, but I think Muse excels when you're in full tablet mode with the stylus. Hence we feature that more prominently in our documentation (https://museapp.com/handbook).
Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) is a great comparison—they have a different design aesthetic, cost a bit more ($249 one-time), but similar use case of deep knowledge work and thinking.
Endless Paper (https://www.endlesspaper.app/) is a sketching/drawing app, so not very similar to Muse.
On the infinite canvas point: this is one of the things we researched in the lab. Our studies revealed that it sounds nice, but in practice it's incredibly disorienting because you have no sense of scale. That's why we have a discretely-zooming interface; the difference is subtle but critical for high-speed thinking working.
Today my team and I are launching Muse, a thinking tool.
Engineers sometimes talk about “typing problems” and “thinking problems”; Muse is for the latter. For example: designing a distributed system, doing a deep read of an algorithms paper, or creating a product roadmap.
My colleagues and I spent a few years doing research at a lab called Ink & Switch. You can read HN discussions of our publications on software performance [1], the creative process [2], and local-first software [3].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18506170
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255457
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581444
One research question for us was whether touchscreens could ever be as powerful as desktop tools like vim or emacs. That resulted a prototype we named Muse. We saw commercial potential and spun it out of the lab last year.
A founding insight for Muse is that deep thinking happens away from the computer. e.g. in a sketchbook, on a whiteboard, or just in your head. There are some up-and-coming tools for thought like Notion and Roam but they’re tied to the desktop/laptop form factor and primarily focused on text. We saw an opportunity for a thinking tool that blends together visual media, text, and offers spatial navigation on a tablet.
Since this is a technical crowd, you might be interested in some of the challenges building this thing, like maintaining 120fps at all times. There is no concept of opening a file or a loading screen—you just navigate to a document and it’s already there. Ink rendering is another ongoing engineering challenge, from point simplification to curve fitting to stroke masking for the eraser. Happy to talk about any of this in the comments.
We’re charging $100/year, comparable to other prosumer tools like Dropbox, Evernote, Roam, etc. There’s a generous free tier and you can export your data as a flat files (PNG, PDF, TXT).
We’re building in public on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MuseAppHQ and Mark and I talk shop on our podcast: https://museapp.com/podcast
HN is known for sharp critique, so bring it on. Will also answer questions or accept praise if you feel like doing one of those :-)
Muse is an iPad app for research, deep thinking, and creativity. We're a four-person team seeking an engineer to join as a ful partner in the business.
You should be excited about high-performance software like video/audio editing tools, game engines, or browser internals. Swift+iOS experience helpful but not required.
Conference talk by a founder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_fe2c6IUUo_
Article about our design approach: https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse-studio-for-ideas.html
Read more and apply here: https://museapp.com/engineering-partner
I've been down the CouchDB/PouchDB path several times with several different engineering teams. Every time we were hopeful and every time we just couldn't get it to work.
As one example, I worked with a small team of engineers to implement CouchDB syncing for the Clue Android and iOS mobile apps a few years back. Some of my experience is written down here[2]. After investing many months of engineering time, including some onsite help from Jan Lehnardt[3] we abandoned this architecture and went with a classic HTTPS/REST API.
Other times and with different teams we've tried variations of Couch including PouchDB with web stack technology including Electron and PWA-ish HTML apps. None of these panned out either. Wish I could give better insights on why--we just can't get it to be reliable, or fast, or find a good way to share data between two users (the collaboration thing is kind of the whole point).
[1]: https://guide.couchdb.org/
[2]: https://medium.com/wandering-cto/mobile-syncing-with-couchba...
Fun fact: I debated whether to call it "the Heroku way" or somesuch. Glad I went with a standalone name, feel like that allowed it to take on a life beyond that product. For example I doubt Google would have wanted a page about "Heroku Way app development on GCP" in their documentation. :-)