adamwiggins
Joined 19 years ago
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adamwiggins.com | cofounder Muse, Ink & Switch, Heroku
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Comment · 2 years ago
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...
Comment · 2 years ago
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.
Comment · 3 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
Heroku pivoted from an online code editor (or "FileMaker Pro for the web") to a git-based development platform.
Comment · 4 years ago
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. :)
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
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 [email protected] and we can try to debug potential problems in the smoothing algorithm.
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
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.)
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
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 :-)
Comment · 4 years ago
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.
Comment · 4 years ago
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.