Being thoughtful in the Information Age + Muse App with Adam Wigginss

hello and welcome to the restarting of uh fission's weekly video chats uh so today is august 6th and we've just had a sort of a july hiatus which means um i was heads down working on a bunch of other things and said okay for august we'll get some more speakers so uh adam is with us and um um i saw that uh he and his team are going to be releasing the muse app um but really he said you know what let's let's talk about not just the tool but um what it means to be thoughtful in the information age so so with that adam i'll i'll hand it over to you um maybe introduce yourself a little bit and whatever you want to say about muse and take it away yeah thanks so much for having me and exactly as you said um what's more important like all product builders i certainly love to show the bits we've been carefully polishing and crafting over many years but i think what's more important in this particular product is a way of working in a philosophy and that's something that goes beyond the product hopefully the product is a good way to to work this way but i really believe in this approach to creativity this approach to problem solving thinking through things and so that's that's what i want to focus on but also give you a sweet sweet product demo while we do it my background is um yes entrepreneur probably a great beard in this industry by some standards probably best known for starting a thing called heroku which is a way to deploy web applications to the cloud and then after that i did incanswitch which is a research lab kind of human computer interaction research lab where we published a bunch of papers and then muse is a ipad app that is a spin out of that research so essentially one of the tracks of research we were doing around kind of future of work and how humans interact with computers is that basically tablets are interesting and underutilized so we ask the question of how they can be used in in productive work and what it would take to sort of make a tablet into a power tool and use as the output of that and we thought it was interesting enough to see if we can turn it into a commercial product that people can use and pay for and get value out of in the real world um actually i would probably start here in in terms of being thoughtful uh in the information age maybe i'll start with a question for the group which is uh where do you go when you want to think through a really hard problem you know if you're a computer programmer for example you probably you know apply your trade by typing code into a text editor but a lot of times they say there's think typing problems and thinking problems the typing problems is the in front of the ide or whatever but the thinking problems an architectural problem or something like that usually you do that maybe away from the computer so i'd be curious to just quickly hear where do you do that and and what do you use you know a whiteboard as one example uh i definitely would say that i go to a paper um or um or a whiteboard i think whiteboards is one of the things that i miss most from working from home including like the semi-persistent whiteboards in shared spaces yeah uh i tend to use uh well historically i was i was whiteboarding um i don't tend to have a lot of people around as uh these days though uh i'm ipad only so uh you know and it's nice to have the infinite canvas on an ipad and be able to share it so mainly on my ipad these days yeah i normally use a pen in a stack of paper uh and i like having a lot of paper so that i can whenever i make a errant mistake i can toss it in the trash and grab a new sheet of paper uh yeah i'm gonna jump in and turn my video on too uh living in bc we're very blessed of having beautiful forest so i go for a walk and um i'm kind of strange because i always like insisted that if it doesn't fit in my head it's too complicated so i don't use anything and if i can not make sense of all of it then i'll have to break it down more um and then uh try to make like some notes when i get back on the computer yeah well that's a good sampling it matches pretty well part of what we did in the research lab was ethnographic research of creative professionals and trying to understand creative process and looking for similarities not just in a particular um sort of field like software engineering or design or architecture but what's what's common across all of these and i think we touched on both of the things here which is one the tools which tend to be analog pen and paper uh whiteboard maybe post-it notes that kind of thing and then uh on the location side you know take a walk go to a cafe you know stare thoughtfully out over a settings you know sunset and and kind of stroke the chin and the sort of thing that there's there's something about the posture and the place that matters a lot and then there's something about the yeah being away from that kind of keyboard and mouse sort of setting i'm definitely a sketchbook uh person in fact you know i've got a big stack of these i've made over the years i actually went back and i even just used these cheapy notebooks from amazon i don't even get like moleskins or whatever and i went back and tallied up my budget for notebooks and i discovered that i spent about 75 a year just on notebooks and i fill them very densely i fill both pages on both sides you know diagrams all that kind of all that kind of thing and also what i think david mentioned there which is uh sort of the externalizing of thought we also see that there's a bit of a split there's a category of people that i think are slightly in the majority but maybe 60 percent who are very much externalized thinkers you need to write it down you sketch it you need to do the envelope sketch to explore an idea to explain to someone else and there's others who are more what i call organics and sort of do it in their head and then maybe i'm envious of that but i'm definitely an externalized thinker i feel like there's an idea between in between there where um my notes are often incomprehensible to other people whether i type them or write them but the act of doing them helps put them in and i often then have to process afterwards to take this shorthand into something that might be shareable or sometimes it's not terrible at all which is interesting because i'm almost the opposite where for me it's all mostly i do most my thing in my head and then it's refinement on paper or on the ipad that makes sense and yeah certainly the at least the rough versions of things not making sense to anyone else it's your own personal shorthand and then there's a process by which you make it more and more comprehensible which means at some point probably making the jump to digital um and you can imagine an end output like a writer is the purest form of this where they're starting with maybe a literal napkin sketch of a few ideas it doesn't make sense to anyone else maybe a couple of bullet points you took on your phone and then gradually that turns into a draft that you can share with others for feedback and eventually it's published in some format that maybe anyone could potentially read and make sense of and get something from so we saw the opportunity here as twofold um you know we i don't believe in taking an analog process and putting it on computer just because but what i do think is that the world has changed in terms of creativity and that's usually what i like to call the information age which is that creativity is as often as not an act of remix an act of taking other ideas that you uh that you're drawing from and i think in this you know world social media and so forth for me twitter is a big one tweets but it's also like pdfs of papers that i'm reading it's books i'm a huge user of kindle and my kindle highlights and pulling you know i read a whole book and then i want to like take the lessons and use that in some way and i pull out my kindle highlights and i want to kind of further refine and remix those and understand them and so what we saw the opportunity here was with the ipad which just in the ipad pro in particular just the last couple of years and particularly the stylus which is actually relatively new it's gotten very very good i actually think it's the best computer hardware ever but at this moment i think for a lot of people it remains sounds like brook you're an exception but for many people that we've spoken to they see the potential of it as a productive and creative tool but for many people it turns into a way to watch netflix on the sofa maybe browse through social media which is fine uses but i think is is a severe under um utilization of this platform so i think this combination of things which is the creative process may be benefiting from digital sources and the sort of untapped potential of the ipad we saw that as the opportunity for muse so with that little preamble here let me share my screen i'll assume everyone can see that all right so this is what muse looks like and one of the pieces of research we explored and i think is connected to the again a creative process and what makes a sketchbook good and what makes a white book book whiteboard good is it's very much a blank canvas for your thoughts it doesn't interrupt you it doesn't try to grab your attention and so in fact um actually the first time we submitted to the app store we were rejected and the reviewer said i think there's something wrong with the app when i run it it's a blank white screen and it turns out that's actually a feature we want 100 of the content to be for the user and be able to like just like the blank page of a notebook and then from there you want to bring in content so of course you can sketch you know i can simply just draw on it and that's what a lot of these kind of like no sketch sketchbook apps for the ipad that exists kind of focus on that and that's fine but i think it's probably not worth paying a thousand dollars for this fancy piece of glass just to sketch maybe um but i think where it gets more interesting is the content that's the digital sources so now i can start to bring things in so i might start for example photo sort of an obvious thing i think for a lot of people their camera roll for me is like kind of an inbox of things i've seen and you know things i want to capture it could include screenshots for example another one of course is files and i mentioned before i read a lot of science papers so that's a big one for me so i can pull in pdfs here you can you can read through them within the tool and kind of place that another one of course is text and so for me i copy paste a lot of text from things like emails and slack and so on in this case maybe i'll just take it from a website here which is sort of a sort of a form of exerting you might say bring that in um and yeah what's one more thing maybe [Music] uh yeah the web links are of course important bookmarks go ahead and do that so a few different types of media that's in here and then once it's all in here you notice that everything i bring in is sort of this this card that can be moved around resize shuffle around so here again we're trying to capture that paper experience where typically you know there's a lot of great pdf annotator apps out there but they tend to give you a kind of a static list sorted by recency or something like that and so you can come in here and annotate your stuff um we got some exerting capabilities like this you can sort of pull out pieces of it and then you place that card on the board and it keeps its source but what's important here is all of these things are you know um all of these things are sort of parallel uh objects in the system they're these cards you can arrange freely on the board and that sort of mixed media canvas free arrangement no um no clutter on the screen it's all your content and then you can sort of scribble all over everything and make make connections that's sort of the core of the application so i'll pause there for for questions any immediate reactions so fast well well thank you teaming this up yeah part of that is of course the ipad pro is 120 frames per second you're not even seeing its full capability um which i think is is really cool but it's also a value for us speed of thought moving fast there's no opening a document a spinner waiting for the thing to come up that it's fast it's fluid it's immediate all the time you're never waiting and we think that that kind of is one of the things that's great about analog stuff you know when you take a post-it note and put it on a whiteboard you're not waiting for the system for some spinner it's all very immediate we think that's important for the creative process how do you organize the sketches like what's the way for is it just flat file structure was here you're talking about like kind of under the hood or as a user no no no just not under the hood just in general it's like if i want to make a new sketch but associate them in some way well you you teed me right up for the next part of things which is we use what's called a zooming interface um so here i can make a new blank board if i want put that wherever and then i can zoom into it and then that becomes a place that i can um put new stuff and then i can zoom back out i can and then that becomes another card that i can place in the system and in fact maybe i want to actually carry some of my other cards here across that and so i basically get this nesting and of course you can imagine i could put yet another one in here if i wanted to do that and so i get this sort of infinitely nested uh arrangement and that's sort of the that sort of structure so all uh visual and um interactive so are are you you you've got that that photo there uh you're doing some some touch gestures um to control some of those things yeah so some of it's pretty obvious and this is a place where a screen chair really doesn't work able to see my hands would be would be helpful and actually i consider doing that um you know just using a uh sometimes i've given demos kind of a document camera then you can't see the screen as well of course being able to see the hands is actually a big deal in fact in our user handbook we um in the user handbook we specifically do filmed um uh filmed hands for some reason but um where i don't know what's going on there because we think being able to see the interactions is important but yeah just to kind of briefly summarize so moving hard is one finger you grab a corner to resize you pinch sort of like google maps um to go in and out pretty you know that's all pretty pretty standard stuff the stylus is drawing um you can pull in this little tool palette from the side if you want to access some of these things and then we have a couple of what we call meta keys so this is where a lot of the research in the lab was around how can we make a touch interface powerful because most touch interfaces are based on the phone they assume you do one hand you do everything with a finger it has to be a button on the screen but here i've got 10 fingers and a stylus and if we treat that as if we treat those as distinct inputs we can do interesting things so that's for example to draw you know i just use the i use the stylus but to erase i put place one finger down and then i can erase and so that doesn't require me to do any kind of toolbar switch back and forth i can just do it kind of pretty instantly and that becomes muscle memory similarly the selection capability let's say i wanted to select everything here i just hold down two fingers and that gives me the select tool like that um so you're really um you're going down the brett victor humane representation of thought um i i think i have that in our reading list on our forum and i'll make i'll make sure to pass it out that's that's directionally where some of the stuff thinking is coming from absolutely yeah we we drew a lot of inspiration from the tools for thought history which includes yeah and certainly brett victor is a modern version of that and why aren't we using more of our natural facilities versus being very kind of restricted um we also draw a lot from the humane interface which is just raskin's book from the late 90s the zooming interface is one specific um piece that's mentioned there um yeah so absolutely many of those academic sources are the inspiration for this and a big part of what we want to do with this venture is not just even though we participated a lot of that research ourselves we wanted to take some of these really powerful ideas that existed in the human computer interaction field in some cases for decades they've never really made their way into commercial products and we we think that's shame we think that um and we felt like this was an opportunity to do that uh i would also say that you know what i'm what i'm seeing and feeling is i'm a very long time mac user um including the the pre-terminal days um and um this makes me think of uh very specifically the app that i'm thinking of is omnigraffle um which i used sort of extensively um and then um as we moved everything to online um and had mainly crappy web apps um we lost that but the collaboration because um omnigraffle didn't make the leap to collaboration yeah um how are you thinking about collaboration collaboration is crucial maybe even table stakes for useful work applications we think that the starting place for a thinking tool has to be private to be intimate it has to be for you um and i think that's you know a lot of these really great team tools like say notion i think are really great on a team and maybe they are less so for an individual and i think that's partially um because they started with the team side and so for me the sketchbook for the whiteboard is a very personal space so we really wanted to and what we're launching here in a couple of weeks is the single user application but i also think that collaboration is crucial on teams and it's just sort of table stakes nowadays but you always have this um i think we see in this industry this divide which is you have omni grapple is a great example of native mac apps and there's lots of other great creators for the ipad and the mac as well as other platforms where they make these native high-speed applications and they're just a joy to use and they don't have spinners they work offline but without that collaboration they're inherently limited or then you have the slack figma notions of the world um and these are great obviously i use these tools uh you can use um it's a nice little uh kind of figma ipad bridge that i use here and i actually use it together with news quite a bit i'll drop in something that i'm working on just through the share sheet here and then be able to bring that in and kind of mark it up a little bit that kind of thing um but uh yeah i think they're they're just look they just aren't high performance and they don't feel as good and i think that is a huge shame and i believe it's possible to have the performance and some of the privacy benefits of the native applications combined with the collaboration capabilities that was another track of research we did in the lab a thing called local first we're very much hoping to bring that to bear when the time comes to begin work on the sharing collaboration features but we really wanted to get that single user experience right fast fluid intimate and then launch that and then we can can think about that next part yeah i think uh it's interesting how you've very much leaned into the os level you know share sheets um as interchange there which means that of course you've you've got this bridge to lots of places it does also make me think and was like related i mean not exactly but partially related to the david's question around under the hood um have you given any thought to how you represent this schema wise so that others could play and remix absolutely so at the moment you can export um as what's basically a zip file with um some json that has the position of the objects and a bunch of flat files one way to think of this is that it's a file browser you know like finder or dropbox or something but it has spatial arrangement um so we'd love to find better ways to kind of connect to that world of file because i love files but they kind of haven't really made the transition very well to the modern internet and mobile era and then there's the extensibility side of it whether that's programmability automation integration with other projects data products data interchange we're really interested in all that at the moment all we have is the muse bundle but um that's a another path we are looking forward to exploring now we've got the kind of core interactions right amazing that's that's great i mean that's very much so um brooke and daniel next week are going to talk about our web native file system and our goal is to um you know despite various anti-trust cries right now if you actually dig around in the settings of all of apple's certainly all their native apps you can change where they're stored and if you make a native app on ios that exposes the file a file interface um you can target it um so i would encourage you to implement that interface because for example people could then store um muse bundles on the fission web native file system so the there are as far as i can tell the hooks are there um for example i've i've selected google drive as the location to save keynote files the google drive side is atrocious and doesn't really work which has kind of been my experience with how they implement things um but i think you know i i haven't seen a ton of use of it but i'm excited that we can do some things with it excellent well if assuming we have time i thought the last thing i i just thought i'd show you is some of so obviously this is a very kind of um you know i'm just poking some cards around just to sort of show you how the mechanically this thing works but a lot of people ask okay well how does it actually work in practice so i just grabbed a couple of boards uh from my recent musing and um i thought oh yeah a verb i love it indeed yeah i've taken to using that verb and again you know coming back to this being thoughtful and being thoughtful in the information age you know we're really building this product as a way to be kind of a quiet place to disconnect while you still have access to your digital sources you really can do this in other ways and i'm just as happy to see people sort of taking that um way of working and either enhancing what they already do or embracing that for example one thing i've seen is just people printing stuff out and using that and drawing all over it and pinning stuff to the walls you see this in design agencies and so forth i think that's a that's basically an amusing process um and one that maybe is uh cheaper than uh than buying an ipad i'm of course a big fan of this device and i hope we continue to make the product better but again it's it's the way of working to me is what's what's important um yeah just to give you a quick idea again i just grabbed these out of some some recent stuff that i did here's you know one for example where i just was doing some mind mapping about how sort of my pieces of my career fit together i particularly like this uh the site eighty thousand hours it talks about how to have have a good impact your career um i grabbed some of my notes here which sometimes end up being you know this is obviously just a photo of a notebook or there's something like um screenshot of you know github or um you know here's a this is a google doc actually that i exported as a pdf so it's very often the case that you know sort of like pulling in this weird hodgepodge of stuff um and you can even see here where you know you could use a piece of pen and paper and a regular sketchbook to do something like this but for me it adds a lot of flavor to drop in these logos of these products and companies i've worked on because there's a lot of for me there's a lot of emotional attachment to that and it makes it more powerful and poignant both in the moment when i'm doing it but also when i come back to look at it later since you pulled up career and some other things um i i heard a rumor that heroku was an accident that you built while you were making a collaborative editor of some kind can you confirm or deny accident's a strong word happy to happy to briefly give the origin story there so um we uh got really inspired this is another example of where sort of some academic work inspired a commercial product which is there's a book called a small matter of programming which is a 1993 book that kind of lays out the what i would now call end user programming idea which is basically making programming tools more widely accessible for essentially non-career software engineers and we saw that with ruby and rails and agile and virtualized servers there was potentially the capability to make kind of an all-in-one development environment that would let you both build the web application and um sort of press a button and have it just sort of be live on the web and so we ended up writing circa 2007 a little kind of editor that ran on the web you know nowadays you got something like github code spaces is a version of this um so there's a little editor you could run edited ruby on rails app and then you would have it sort of live and what happened with that was we ended up pivoting because we discovered one the web was a little too early to do any kind of substantial programming tools circa 2007 you could argue it's still too early today but um and then the second thing was people really love the second part which is just one button push to have their application live without any servers or ssh config files so we basically extracted that part of it and turned turned that into the the platform um so accident would be a little strong i would go with um yeah it was a classic pivot right you start with one you know we're passionate about a domain we started with one idea for a solution in that domain that wasn't the right solution or it wasn't the right time but then we kind of extracted from that the real the real product uh lee are you online do you want to unmute yourself i want to ask you uh i i feel like a lot of this interface and stuff is similar to um how you work in some of your your common craft stuff including starting on whiteboards do you want to maybe share a little bit about how you're thinking about this and how you work yeah yeah sure um let's see i can turn my video on to you just so it's a little more friendly here hi everyone um so yeah i was thinking in the beginning about how i think and you know i write i've written a couple of books too and a lot of times it starts with post-it notes and doing the process of posting notes on the board and that reminds me a bit of that um as well um i think you know if you're familiar with common craft videos they are were traditionally filmed on a whiteboard and now they just are digital with a white background but it is kind of starting at that blank slate and trying to create an experience that explains an idea through um a video that uh usually has a voiceover and you know that's a a different thing than what we're discussing here but i think there are a lot of similarities um uh one of the things that i was curious about as i was watching this is i noticed you drew uh arrows in part of your interface a little bit ago adam and i wondered if if you thought about having any onboard shapes or things that kind of like flow chart sorts of of things that might make that easier yeah for sure and i think you know we talked about omni group earlier omni graffle uh you know had some of that and um some of these design tools even have shape net recognition when you draw something with the stylus there's obviously connecting boxes together so the box is stay connected where they are um we've explored that a little bit and and i don't rule it out necessarily but um i think the vibe you could say we're going for is messy so we specifically want something that doesn't feel like the computer is arranging things for you it's it's like your desk you put stuff down it doesn't exactly quite line up you draw a scribble kind of stays where you put it it's not sort of arranging or sorting things for you not saying there isn't necessarily places for for helpers in the future or adding new tools or certainly we get to the day when there's maybe more extensions and that sort of thing for different use cases because i definitely think exactly what you're describing the explaining use case where it needs to be a little neater and a little bit more um you know that maybe goes naturally with collaboration you see that naturally being to snap to grid and arrows that you can connect boxes and the arrows stay connected um that's sort of like classic diagramming thing but we really wanted something that felt like a whiteboard sketchbook posted notes and i think the messiness of it is just part of creativity and that was another thing that popped out in our user interviews i think was people almost feel embarrassed of that messiness sometimes it's like oh my handwriting's so bad or my sketches are so bad but that's that is the point that is when you're developing the idea not the artifact you actually want it to be a little messy yeah for sure one other question one quick question i had too just being coming from the sort of video side uh i didn't notice if you did but uh can you drag videos into the interface as well that are playable i all of you are just just teeing us up perfectly here we're literally working this week so yeah yeah i think video is such an important content coming back to this information age and if we say okay we can do better than just a digital sketchbook we can do things that embrace the digital native you know i think of this similar to i recently read the history of powerpoint and at the time the first versions of powerpoint were a way to print out overhead transparencies it was basically a way to produce these physical world artifacts that people use for presentations and at some point it actually took ten you know the software had been existence five or ten years but projectors came along people started realizing hey we actually don't need to print out our transparencies we can actually present straight from the computer once they started doing that the slides could get a lot richer and a lot more you know basically embrace the power of digital i think i see something similar here we're kind of the this a lot of the sketchbook kind of style apps that are on the ipad now or just this transliteration of analog tools to digital and there's benefits to that it's more shareable it's more searchable i don't know you don't get a big stack of papers in your office but i think it's sort of minimal and i think that the real step change is going to come with digital sources and i think video is so important all the tasks and knowledge that shares shared on youtube being able to watch talks um take notes that that sort of thing so now how that fits into a kind of a calm you know environment like this doesn't have a lot of motion on the screen and how you can handle all that is very much a design challenge we're looking forward to tackling but we we already have a prototype that's um i'll see if we can pull it up here actually might have the alpha build to let you just basically drop in a movie file uh and lee what i'm seeing a lot of is sort of there's some hackability through the standard interfaces so if you had a folder full of common craft cutouts uh in your photos in your icloud drive you could easily from the interface that i'm seeing drag and drop yeah yep um yeah so make sense so you can explain to people how they can hack the system yeah yeah it's similar to a powerpoint slide in that way um that you know any any kind of visual you can just drag right in yeah i'm seeing the video that's great still very rough around the edges but yeah we're literally working on that this week yeah cool so sorry in your version of rough around the edges is that like it wasn't like 800 frames per second or something like that because that looked pretty smooth to me um one of the hardest well thank you uh yeah one of the hardest challenges actually in introducing new things in many ways we're kind of making a new style of interface um sometimes we joke and say we're trying to make vim for tablets uh which is a lot of fun and allows us to make things that are more powerful i think than any of the existing ipad apps which tend to be kind of scaled up phone apps not always um but they they tend to be very limited you can push sort of one button at a time and that's that's kind of that um or maybe some very simple gestures and so when you have this complex gesture vocabulary then when you bring in something new like okay we've got this media player with the video all right you used to like the scrubbing controls and you can play pause it and you zoom in to kind of get the full screen mode but how does that interact with all of other other things when you're selecting when you're inking you're doing these other operations so making that all fit together in a way that's logically coherent for the user's mental model about how the gesture system works is that's what challenges that's sort of interesting so you mentioned musing as a verb um which is great um have you uh have you named other can you briefly just just situate us by talking about the other uh objects uh that you think of in um in muse today yeah for sure we have our own little set of special jargon here which is part of why we made a handbook uh markham actually recorded a whole podcast that was basically in defensive manuals because what you see is in the in the mobile era people expect to just download an app try it they don't pay attention to the tour read a manual are you kidding me um we actually love manuals because it implies sort of the tool with depth and you spend a little time to learn it and that learning will pay off in the form of of power later on um but it can it is actually a source of um friction a little bit that people expect that interestingly they don't expect that from a desktop app but because it's on a mobile platform they expect let me figure it out right away but anyways yeah we have sort of a series of so one we would we would have the um uh this kind of let's do this this guy so this is a card and we try to that's sort of the we're thinking about as sort of the mobile version of a file i mean it is a file under the hood when you do an export you get a you get the original uh file because again i love files files feel very physical um but what i don't like about them is they tend to be like a small blurry thumbnail and a big file name so here the file name is totally optional you can come in here and add one later and then you get this little label and in fact that becomes searchable in your your system but by default you have this thing and so every absolutely everything is a card that includes um let's see what did i do here yeah pdf but the canvas itself is another object so that's right so then okay the next the next one here is so everything is a card and that includes boards but that's this next object here which is board which we could have called canvas but um there's a couple there actually is a couple of these other other these mixed media canvases more for collaboration like miro and milanote not they're not on tablet but they kind of have a similar kind of mixed media thing that we like and um uh my handwriting's bad and so we call it a board and so that's one of these things um and so yeah you put something here you can actually expand it to make it wider as well and so then those can be infinitely nested so you can do as many many of those as you want in fact i have a pretty deep board hierarchy in my my system now um we also have a few other concepts which include the sort of quasimode which again is the holding down one finger as well as the selection uh stuff we've got the inbox which is this little thing on the right so actually when you use the share sheet elsewhere in the operating system which is a really common i think you saw me do that with figma that's a really common uh way to share something from another application that lands in your we also have a little phone app so if you're on the go you snap a photo you take a little note you hit share to muse it'll kind of pop into this little inbox on the side and part of why we do that rather than place it on the board is one of our values is the computer shouldn't move stuff around that you put there and it's like your office you leave stuff on the desk you leave stuff up on the whiteboard you go away you come back the next day you're upset if someone's moved it around so we try to do a similar thing so you get this little stash on the side which you can also use to carry stuff around a quick question about i've seen you duplicate things a few times especially with pdfs is it a copy and now they have like different histories and you can mark them up separately or is it i can highlight something and in both places it's highlighted yeah excellent question um so we actually did the what we called a mirror if you read our research paper from last year where we had just a prototype of this lab we did a what we called a mirror which was a reference copy and we thought that was that would be really neat to have something in kind of multiple places and as i think people have also learned with kind of references and file systems users find that quite confusing um so what we actually found more commonly people want is the duplicate and ultimately we'd like to offer both but yeah basically what we do with um with this one here this duplicate is you know where if you get a whole bunch so this is a set that are unrelated so you can imagine if i come in here and draw on top of that this duplicate doesn't uh doesn't get that yeah and i tend to use this quite a lot for duplicating even whole boards if i feel like i want to i'll make it sort of a template here let's say i was going to work from um here's an example of kind of like a sort of a website mock-up for an article that i'm that i'm working on but let's say i want to like you know make some variations and this is again something i love about files and file systems it's very easy to just make a copy go in and you can you know try try some different things on that and then um you know come back out and be able to compare or if you decide that you know it's not it's not quite working through that throw that away which by the way you may have seen this also but the way you delete things in here is you just throw it off the edge of the screen now you're just showing off [Laughter] yeah i think that's there are some downsides to that but uh yeah we uh we again we like that we're trying to get some of the things we love about files and power tools on the desktop but having some of the fluidity fun playfulness that you get with mobile applications well we'll see if those two things actually fit together but we think so far they do that's great to hear about the uh the iphone app um as well i think i'm probably one of the few people who has actually used uh the muse app brooke did you end up getting into the beta yet or not i forget uh i don't think i've received a code yet but even if i had i've just been so overwhelmed yeah yeah yeah we're kind of busy it i think what's interesting is yeah your discussion about the conceptual piece and gesture piece being hard of pushing this kind of stuff into a person's brain so that they can be effective with it is interesting adam where um you know we're thinking along some of the same things with file systems um and um you know thinking about the technological capabilities we have of linking back into a written journals and so on but you have to do this like principle of least surprise um and it's unclear how we can do that i've been really watching google drive they have this weirdo alias thing now uh well like i feel really good about the deep dark hole that dropbox and google drive are driving themselves in that is leaving room for a whole new renaissance of things like muse and things like fission which go black to to simplicity and then grow in a different direction um and like i can i can see why they would put those things in um but that's this is the whole challenge of uh you know once you have a lot of users who are you targeting and everything else um i think that's really fascinating i think like from my engineering background i'm like i i'd like some of these objects to be linked and and i think i think the the rome inspired backlink is a new primitive that we're going to start seeing everywhere i think that's something that might be really powerful in here too have you thought much about that absolutely so our um first step there on the kind of the full linking thing is what i showed you here with the excerpts um so if you come in and take out um a piece of this and um say that you get this little little dot here um that basically saves you know sort of the context in fact i can go zoom and get back to the document so that's that's essentially a link and right now we just have it for excerpts but our plan is that this this little dot here is something you'd be able to add anywhere to create a general purpose link and you can see how that that's the forward links and then you see here with the excerpt you get kind of a sort of a version of a backlink and and the two-directional linking i think is i think you're right that's rome has really set a new uh standard or raise the bar in in a certain way and i think that's something i'd like to see make its way into all kind of productivity applications and certainly thinking applications like use it's coming i mean i think the the main thing that i think that just ripped through the industry i mean they're they're sort of trello and kanban and drag and drop that you can kind of get as a standard ui ux component now um i think the other piece um that was a app called mailbox it ended up getting bought by dropbox that pioneered uh snoozing emails um you know they put them away and said you know bring them back next week or whatever which again now is a common pattern that's everywhere um but it was the beach head thing that people said oh okay i'm using mailbox it has this nothing else has this and then it kind of went everywhere else and um i think i think that's what i'm really looking for that lets us bootstrap understanding of people where again you don't necessarily have to do the entire manual first that's super interesting um you know when you say being thoughtful um that's tools that's reading manuals i mean you're really you're expecting more of users too which i think is great um you're you're launching live with muse which really means it's going to be for sale on the app store at the end of the month that's right august 27th so we're about two and a half weeks out just kind of teeing all that up right now and trying to get all our ducks in a row to present to the world and you're doing um you're doing it desktop app style where you're going to have one price or annually or how are you thinking about that right now that's right so it's 100 bucks a year which is definitely a a unexpectedly high price i think for mobile applications where the standard has uh you know been sort of the race to the bottom stuff in the consumer app store for the iphone things are out supported or maybe they're you know five bucks 10 bucks um so we but we think that's actually something really holding back professional tools um and so we decided to come out with something a little bold which is there's not even a monthly price it's just sort of this one uh price and we were a little nervous about that at first um but actually the beta is uh um uh you you can try for free but actually it has that paid tier and we already have a pretty good number of customers we've been surprised for how much it is the case for professionals that work with ideas for a living something that is going to help them think a little better actually is worth it or they can justify that in the context of the work they do now in the longer term that's not a i think it a little bit like the tesla master plan which is started by selling the roadster which was you know more the high end price and what we hope to do in the future these early supporters it's almost more like a kickstarter or something to help us because because we're not venture backed we want to kind of get the thing off the ground and built and over time we'll be able to introduce more pricing tiers for students and and other folks that can't necessarily justify that price monthly pricing and so forth so that's the setup we already have a good number of customers we're happy about that i'm interested to see what happens with the launch people are screaming bloody murder because it's this weird thing right we're a professional application on your desktop computer dropbox or a notion or a figma or devon think yeah of course you pay 10 bucks a month or something like that but once you come onto the mobile platform people expect something different and i think that's something that really holds back professional tools so we'll see what the market thinks so yeah yeah uh geary and i um paid for i guess it was a subscription um that we both thought was too low um and we're like screw that we're going over to your open collect and we're adding another 50 bucks uh for the year kind of thing like you you're not gonna be able to survive um and i think that there's i think there's a movement uh zeitgeist of people saying if we pay you one you you stay alive uh and make it better two i feel comfortable that me paying you means that you're not taking up all of my shannon information theory scribbles and data mining them um so i think the timing is good um and i wonder um i wonder how you think about like again labeling is powerful what what do we call that do you want to kick off a movement or or make a statement there instead like you are just by doing this but is it is there a label that you can maybe connect to other other actions that people can get behind i haven't thought of that before but giving something a name is certainly a powerful way to um make it into a thing and i think you're absolutely right we're far from the first to realize it's not sustainable to expect that all software in the world is either made by increasing rounds of venture capital or data mining and ad you know ad supported software or what typically what very often happens with um otherwise promising productivity tools is build it using venture money for a while run out of money it's not sustainable get acquired product gets shut down or otherwise you know goes to um yeah goes to go to some unhappy place um so yeah so and certainly you know base camp has been singing this tune for a very long time and i think we're already seeing this right rome is uh you know what is it 15 bucks a month so it's 165 a year or something like that hey.com is 99 a year that's basically a personal you know a personal tool um you know dropbox has been there for a while maybe so it seems like that's something that is emerging people are aware that if you don't pay for the software for yourself you become the product um um and so yeah the i don't know you should pay for software or be suspicious if you're not not paying for software that's not to say we shouldn't try to make software as affordable and as accessible as possible we don't want to make a you want to make a slight analogy again yeah exactly the the goal and part of what's great about software is that it is it is possible to distribute it to the whole world and over time you can if something truly useful many people maybe everyone can eventually have it and use it but you gotta it does cost a lot of money up front to fund and if that money doesn't come from uh venture capital and ads you know it's come from the customers and i think we've seen this in the video game world with like steam early access and kickstarter maybe we're seeing this a little bit in the youtube world with patreon and that sort of thing so maybe there's a version of that in indie software development that is um hey please buy a please buy a subscription because that's how you allow things like this to exist yeah also something that we're thinking about um i think we're almost at an hour and i know you've got a beautiful berlin evening that you need to like drink a rattler by the river um this has been really great i'm super happy to hear that uh muse bundles um are json and your your love for files which is which is weird when you have the super graphical interface but like amazing um and uh i'd like to commit to we've actually got some people building sample apps right now um so uh if uh we'll we'll talk offline but uh i'd love to get the details on the on the json um and i'd love to build a little uh viewer app at the very least that does something interesting amazing um and uh because it's you know all the things that you're saying are are um uh you know i'll speak for myself but i think the rest of my team is gonna like be like yes this is what we want uh this has been really really great so uh round of applause thank you very much um i will for listening and the great questions i will stop the recording buttons

Channel: Fission

Views: 1,745

Keywords: fission, ipad, muse

Id: wiL8Yk598uQ

Length: 52min 17sec (3137 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020