Show HN: Muse 2.0 with local-first sync

[adamwiggins]

Hey HN, I want to share with you something I and my four colleagues have been working on for the last several years. It’s a whiteboarding and notes tool called Muse[1]. We just released a 2.0 version which includes local-first sync.

A little backstory: I’m one of the authors of the 2019 essay Local-first software[2]. (Past HN discussions[3][4].) The thesis is to reclaim some of the ownership over our data that we’ve lost in the transition from filesystems to cloud/SaaS. So I’m excited to bring CRDT technology “out of the lab” and into a commercial product as a chance to prove the value of local-first in real-world usage.

As a developer and computing enthusiast, I care about abstract ideas like data ownership. But for most users I think the benefits of local-first will surface in how it feels to use the software day-to-day. One example is ability to work offline or in unstable network conditions: any changes between devices will be automatically merged when you reconnect to the network, no matter how long you’ve been disconnected.

Another area is performance. The sync backend was written by my colleague Mark McGranaghan who has written extensively about software performance[5][6] and why we think the cloud will never be fast enough to make truly responsive software.

A few technical details:

– Client-side CRDT written in Swift, streaming sync server written in Go

– Sync server is generic, doesn’t have any knowledge of the Muse app domain (cards, boards, ink, etc). Just shuffles data between devices

– Transactional, blob, and ephemeral data are all managed by this one single state system. For example ephemeral data (someone wiggling a card around) for example, isn’t even transmitted if there are no other clients listening in realtime.

More in this Metamuse podcast episode.[7]

We draw heavily on research from people like Martin Kleppmann, Peter van Hardenberg[8], and many others. A huge thank you to this wonderful research community.

Even if you have no interest in the Muse concept of a digital thinking workspace, I’d encourage you to try the free version just to see how local-first sync feels in practice. My opinion is that is fundamentally different from web/cloud software is well as from classic file-based software—and an improvement on both. Would love to hear what you think.

[1]: https://museapp.com/

[2]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581444

[5]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/slow-software/

[6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18506170

[7]: https://museapp.com/podcast/56-sync/

[8]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/pushpin/

[pvg]

Also showhn here in 2020, 189 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24294397

[aeone]

I love Muse, and 2.0 is a huge gain for me. I only wish that the inking/writing/drawing experience was a bit better.

When I use a real pen to write notes on real paper, my handwriting is pretty! That generates positive feelings for me both when I create notes, and also when I review notes. In the same way, the apps in which my handwriting looks good create a feedback loop where seeing my own handwriting encourages me to continue to write more, and makes the app more "sticky" for me. At the moment, my handwriting in Muse looks displeasing, which discourages me from writing more. I'm currently getting around this by mostly using the new text note type instead of ink, but it is a more limited kind of expression and note taking than free-form inking, which is a shame.

I understand this behaviour/reaction is unlikely to be universal, or might be a condemning expression of vanity on my part in some way, but still - I might not be alone!

[adamwiggins]

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.

[humblehacker]

You are not alone, and thank you for articulating this better than I could. The handwriting experience is the reason I return to Notability for any significant writing despite its performance problems. I've yet to find an app that reaches the same level of handwriting fidelity.

I really hope the good people at Muse make this a priority. That, and search.

[jot]

Using this makes me feel like the iPad is finally better than paper.

It’s so rare to see such attention to detail.

My only wish is that I could pay the team more directly rather than via Apple.

[adamwiggins]

Much appreciated! And yeah the "Apple tax" isn't awesome but lots to be said for user trust on being in the App Store, a frictionless purchase experience, etc.

[russelldjimmy]

Instead of assuming that the team gets only 70% of the fee, why not assume that they charge 100% of what they want, and then tack on the 30% that Apple is demanding? That way, the team is getting paid reasonably.

[MarquesMa]

I'm very intrigued for the CRDT approach. I always want to try CRDT but always end up giving up local-first for simpler approaches, because I can't convince myself fully since there's a risk of accumulating CRDTs data structures too large.

Really looking forward to see your success, it might move the industry forward and bring better apps for the users.

BTW the app is fantastic!

[adamwiggins]

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.

[hatware]

Exciting to see innovation in the note-taking and brainstorming space. Too bad I've decided that the subscription model has got to go, so I'm not interested in using the 'free' side of anything with that model. How else should I fight against it?

Goodnotes knows how to keep users like me happy. Pay once for core functionality and unlimited "objects," and be smarter about monetization beyond that. I started with Notability, and after barely getting the hang it was already nagging me to pay monthly.

As it sits, I think developers are missing out on some of their best users and best feedback, but they do it to themselves by adopting these models without understanding the risks, and scaring away their best customers.

[adamwiggins]

Enlighten us! How are people that don't want to pay for software "their best customers"?

GoodNotes is great, hope they can make the one-off payment model sustainable. But the reality is that cost needs to match with value over time, and the industry is moving to subscriptions because that's a sustainable model for productivity software.

[skinnymuch]

A lot of notes subscription pricing arguments rely on Goodnotes being one time payment or OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep being free.

Goodnotes recently switched to free to download and then upgrading with iAP. Before it was always paid upfront. Coincidentally, this free to iAP switch is also a necessary switch to eventually becoming SaaS. If Goodnotes switches to SaaS, sure smaller upstart apps will be there with buy once, but if they get big, they too will become subscriptions. Notability was one time payment just a couple months ago for its entire existence.

OTOH, the other big free apps are run by the enormous monopolistic big brother tech companies. I’d prefer not supporting them and pointing to them doesn’t help because their reasoning for being free is to get people into their own varied walled gardens/ecosystems. A lot of innovations are unlikely to come from these companies apps. They are there to catch the widest net of [casual] users. It’s all business for them.

All of this is like how South Park[0] parodied both Walmart/big box stores, and the consumers who enable this behavior and how it is a cycle that keeps going on.

0. https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_W...

[olivertaylor]

I love Muse so much. It’s a very different way of organizing your thinking. I use it for everything. My todo list, my research, reading papers and PDFs, outlining bits of writing, shopping lists, presentations, trip planning, marking-up images/notes to send to people — not to mention using it for THINKING, which is probably the best part.

[adamwiggins]

Thanks for the kind words, Oliver. And yeah, funny how using computing devices for thinking is still such a novel idea, more than half a century after Engelbart wrote about computers augmenting human intellect!

[tmcw]

I've watched Muse for the sidelines for a long time. Huge props to Adam and co for not only creating this quality app but also publishing so, so much about the process of doing that and writing articles that'll definitely inform future efforts.

Anyway, I've watched from the sidelines because I don't own an iPad, but now there's a Mac app! Woo

[adamwiggins]

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.

[lstamour]

I went a bit off track with this comment. So upfront I'll say that an iPad and an Apple Pencil is required to make the most of this app. The macOS app is not yet as polished as I'm certain it will get, and the iPhone app is ... severely lacking. (Erm, very focused on what it does?)

Having briefly played with the iPhone, macOS and iPad apps today for the first time I can definitively say:

1. The iPhone app is confusing - especially when syncing for the first time. There are zero controls, you can't sign in or sign out, and it's not even clear how the app works. The iPhone app lets you collect inbox items, then you can drag them out on an iPad or Mac to a particular board later. But it only synced/kept the items I added after I set up an iPad or macOS app. In fact, items only synced after I set up my iPad. (Which was odd.)

2. The macOS app has weird jerky behaviour when scrolling using a magic trackpad where it tries to "stop" at the right points when I kind of just want to smoothly navigate. The same isn't true of the iPad version, or at least the iPad seemed to perform buttery smooth in general.

3. I created a new board on the macOS app and it didn't seem to prompt me to name the board. I right clicked and renamed the board and the UI that showed up was very ... iOS-like? Big fat modal, tiny input in the middle. Not what I expected. Then I added the name, and it didn't show up until I entered the board then exited the board and maybe resized the board.

4. I went to my iPad after using the app on my mac and the items on the board hadn't resized themselves correctly. They moved - yes - but not perfectly. I had to resize and place items again, which felt a bit odd.

5. I wanted to expand the canvas to the left, and couldn't, because the canvas apparently only expands to the right or bottom of the screen. Okay, but then selecting everything on the Getting Started board and moving it to give myself extra space on the left is both annoying and somehow super-slow to finish redrawing/saving. Perhaps this isn't that noticeable because selecting everything is a simple shortcut on the Mac, but isn't frequently/easily done on iPad.

I actually have a renewed appreciation for apps like Obsidian and Craft and Notion because for all the rough edges (and there are often a lot with these kinds of apps!), they really do "just work" pretty darn well.

I think the app closest in spirit, if not in implementation, might be OneNote, with how you can make and drag text blocks and scribble notes with ink and so on. Obviously Muse has the concept of "infinitely nested boards" but I'm not actually sold on it as a replacement for tagging or infinite canvas. If you can't fluid zoom, you're navigating between "pages" but making me think about where I've placed each page's content within its parent, which is a bit strange. It's like having Finder stuck in "Icon view" and no way to set it to "List" or "Detail" view to sort or browse as I please. I enjoy not having to think about tagging or hyperlinks, but ... I also don't have those features either. Snipping of a PDF or image and seeing the larger view (in context) is great, but the alternative I used to use was to use OneNote's PDF Printout feature, and then when later referring to a slide, I could link to part of a OneNote note to go back to it in the source doc.

I actually don't like/use OneNote often because the interface is so different on every platform and because its feature set needs to keep up with the times. For example, a standout feature of OneNote was that it would perform OCR on images and you could search images for text. Cool. But an M1 MacBook or iPad now does that "for free" and as a bonus, you can select text within the image as if it were actually text (something that OneNote never offered unless you converted or extracted the text from the image) and I think it does column detection and so on, like Preview did for PDFs.

I'd really like to see Apple come up with a generic way to embed snippets or previews of documents in other documents. Bonus points if they can find a way to enable "live editing" like Adobe or Microsoft do in their suites, such that from right inside a macOS app that I've embedded an OmniGraffle diagram, say, I can edit the diagram then finish and go back to the app it is being displayed in. Kind of like how if you edit an Excel file in Word, the UI suddenly changes to Excel, but then you stop and it goes back to Word again.

Is it hard? Yes. Would it probably require a lot of transparent layering to make this work? Yes. Would it be absolutely awesome? Yes.

The way I see it, some apps do outlining really well, some apps do spreadsheets well, some apps do diagramming well... I'd love to be able to embed and/or round-trip a screenshot to the original app and then back to a PNG or PDF export again, all without leaving the document or app it's being displayed in.

I know, I'm asking for Apple to reinvent Microsoft OLE. But they would do it better, wouldn't they? An advanced version could maybe work something like iOS Widgets, but should allow re-use of document edit views. Perhaps the auto-save dropdown could be re-purposed to include options for embedding files and showing the file size including embedded files, as well as listing each of the embedded files.

Anyway... not sure how I got to making a feature request to Apple here.

All I'm saying is Muse is pretty awesome, but it could be even more awesome. :)

[dshipper]

Very satisfied Muse user. It's great for compiling lots of research, reading PDFs, and basically getting a good visual map of what you're learning.

[adamwiggins]

Thanks Dan! Hope the Mac app is a good addition to your workflows as well.

[kndjckt]

Yesss! I've been looking for something like this for the longest time. Nested thoughts / boards is the way to go!

Will test.

My current stack is something like -

Noteshelf - ipad notes

Clover - mac notes

Bear - phone / personal notes

You can do ipad notes with Clover but I found the UI a little clunky and pencil responsiveness not great.

[adamwiggins]

Great list. Bear is an inspiration for us in particular.

And yeah nested boards[1] and a zooming UI (ala Jef Raskin[2]) is one of the big elements that makes Muse different.

[1]: https://museapp.com/how/nestedboards/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

[rchaud]

Very cool website, I can appreciate the effort that went into describing the features. I've been using Markdown-based tools for thought like Logseq and ObsidianMD, but have run into some limitations.

Any hope for an Android app?

[adamwiggins]

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.

[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/slow-software/

[hamsterbase]

Local-first software is my favorite article.

I studied CRDT for six months, read many CRDT papers and created my own local fist app.

[flappyeagle]

it must pack a real punch

[hosh]

I use Evernote for a kind of thought workspace, journaling, and knowledge base. The time-to-type (the time between opening up the app to being able to type something on a new note) has been getting worse with each revision.

Seeing this app with this kind of local-first sync makes me seriously consider moving off of Evernote.

Does this have a sink I can install on one of my Linux boxes that I can use to backup everything?

[adamwiggins]

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.

[npollock]

In your "local-first software"[2] article, you discuss data privacy and encryption:

"Local-first apps can use end-to-end encryption so that any servers that store a copy of your files only hold encrypted data that they cannot read."

Does Muse encrypt the user's data (notes, images, sketches, etc)?

[adamwulf]

not yet - but this is very high on our priority list! If we had built in encryption in this first step, then it wouldn't extended development time by many months. Instead, we chose to release sync first, prove the core local-first technology works and is scalable, and add in encryption in phase 2. The basic protocols and data structures are designed with encryption in mind, so we're excited to start work on that very soon.

[yes_but_no]

I really like the idea but even "How Muse boards work" board lagging on my iPad pro 10.5 and I don't enjoy the pen feel. I think default notes app or even better Concepts app (which is another infinite canvas app and doesn't lag) have a much better pen feeling.

Still subbed tho.

[adamwiggins]

Thanks for trying & buying. Concepts has amazing pens (makes sense because it's focused on drawing), but agree we can/should improve the ink experience a lot.

[divan]

If you're exploring similar apps space, check out https://endlesspaper.app It's iPad only, but super simple and truly gives you "better paper" experience.

[adamwiggins]

Great sketching app! But unrelated to Muse, which is a thinking workspace focused on text, PDFs, links, and images. The ink annotations and ability to sketch are a minor feature.

[nikivi]

Any plans to open source some code for making the Go sync server work?

I know there exist service like Replicache that I assume does something similar. But one written in Go would be awesome to see.

[adamwiggins]

Yes, agreed. That would be up to my colleague Mark[1], but I'll take the liberty of copy-pasting something he wrote earlier:

> Unfortunately we're not going to be in a position to open source or license the syncing software in the short term. As you noted there's inevitably overhead with that and we can't take that on right now as such a small team. Also I still feel like we need to prove out our approach more in production, starting with rolling out the sync capabilities to the full Muse user base and scaling that userbase up a bit. I'm open to considering open-sourcing in the future but that'd probably be a ways off.

> I was speaking with another developer at an early-stage company recently and he mentioned that he'd been having good results with Automerge, which has come a long ways in the last ~2 years since we looked at it deeply. Importantly the Automerge[2] team is now tackling the storage and network problems in earnest, making it a more viable production option. So you might look into that project if you haven't yet.

[1]: https://markmcgranaghan.com/

[2]: https://automerge.org/

[gloosx]

This is cool. I stopped using Notion forever when I started to place images in my documentation, on 4th image it said: you can't place more images dude, pay us now. This drove me crazy since I wanted this document to be only local, and I could easily use file:// URLs to show them. Funny thing – there is an ability to input image URL but it doesn't accept file:// for dirty money-making reasons. Now there is something better around

[ChadNauseam]

Note that this costs money too

[throwaway743]

Anyone have a Windows, Linux, and/or Android alternative?

[hjkl0]

Kosmik may also be an alternative:

https://www.kosmik.app/

It’s a “visual tool for thought”. The screenshots look very similar to Muse, but I can attest that in use, the actual experience is much less polished.

Also, not really sure it supports any other platform, but definitely looks like an app that would be on Win/Linux before something like Muse will.

[adamwiggins]

Best bet here is web apps like https://kinopio.club/

[Fede_V]

I wish this was on the GoodNotes/SublimeText model: pay once for a premium version of the app, and then never worry about subscriptions. The moment something requires subscription my threshold for buying it goes up 1000 fold.

[goerz]

I'm usually not too fond of subscriptions either, but I have to say that Muse has the most ingenious subscription model I've ever come across: If you're using it casually, the free version is plenty (Remember that you can always archive stuff by exporting it, and 100 cards will go a long way. Plus, you can stop paying and still have read-access and even limited editing for your existing boards).

If you use it heavily as a daily driver, then the $3.99 or $9.99 should be a drop in the bucket. It scales very naturally between casual use and the paid tiers. Personally, I could probably do with the $3.99, but I'm choosing to pay the $9.99 since I want to support their ongoing research. Their podcast shows the enormous amount of thought they're putting into this, and it shows! Together with Blink (an SSH app with similar focus on UX design) this is by far the most productive iPad app I have.

[Arubis]

Especially true for any sort of note taking/reference tool. If I’m on the hook for a subscription to access part of my brain, that is a _problem_.

Edit: granted, Muse looks gorgeous and I don’t mind paying for things. Just echoing subscription fatigue.

[rchaud]

Agreed. Subscriptions make sense if it's a "business" app, i.e. something you are using to run your business, e.g. Adobe CC, Office 365.

But this one looks like personal app, with little in the way of corporate functionality (Kanban boards, todos, etc). Why not charge a flat fee for 1 year of updates, and make updates optional after that?

I have the same beef with the makers of MindNode, a mind-mapping app for MacOS. It's $2.99/mo which is not much, but I chose to go with SimpleMind Pro because it was a flat 25 EUR.

Developers know the term "write once, deploy anywhere". How about "charge once, use forever"?

[tomtheelder]

> The moment something requires subscription my threshold for buying it goes up 1000 fold.

I agree, but unfortunately it's the opposite for most folks. Subscriptions are here to stay.

[fumar]

I want to try it but upon Mac download, it requires an email to proceed. Apple sign-on or Hide my email don't populate as an option.