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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: This ends up becoming a question about file standards more than it does about application functionality. I can take a notion document and fairly easily translate that into a text file, a very linear document format. There’s currently not really a file format for spatial canvas. Right now there’s just not a good way for Muse to talk to another spatial canvas app.

00:00:30 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan.

00:00:45 - Speaker 2: Hey, Adam, and another colleague, Adam Wulf.

00:00:48 - Speaker 1: Hey everyone.

00:00:49 - Speaker 2: And Wulf, I understand you recently spent some time in prison.

00:00:53 - Speaker 1: That’s true, and it’s so good to be out with everyone again. I, of course, was not technically in prison, well, I guess I was.

I volunteer with a program called the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. They actually help felons who are near release go through and kind of 3 month entrepreneurship school. They do character development and then learn about starting their own business, and really help them get their feet under their ground again, find their sea legs when they get released.

So they do a lot with employment. And housing and support, and a lot of education on the inside of the walls, and a lot of support on the outside of the walls and family reunification, and it’s really just a wonderful program that helps. Inmates helps their families, and ends up helping society.

And so the, the big number that matters is national recidivism, which is the number of people who get released from prison and go back into prison, is extremely high. It’s somewhere around like 40 or 50% end up going back into prison.

And graduates of this program, it’s as low as like 5 or 7%, and so it just has a dramatic effect for these men and for their families. And so it’s been really fun to volunteer with the past. Gosh, probably 5 years, something like that.

So, yeah, if anyone ever wants to be locked in prison with me, then give me a shout out. We’ll make it happen.

00:02:18 - Speaker 2: Sounds like a really worthy program. Well, we’ll link them in the show notes. I’m definitely a believer that how a society treats the people that need to be removed for sort of justice reasons and what you do when they’ve, you know, fulfilled their debt to society, as the saying goes, and how you make a transition back to normal life says a lot about it. It seems like a really great program you’re involved in there.

So we can jump straight into our topic today, which is listener questions. This is our second mailbag episode. Mark, you and I did one year and change back, and I think it was quite a lot of fun to go through all the questions people submitted. And now feels like a good time to me just because we’re 2 months or so out from the launch of our 2.0 product and the dust is still settling, but in many ways we spent a lot of the last two months just answering questions through all channels Twitter. Hacker news, but most especially through our support channel, that’s [email protected] and the in-app thing. So we’re in a question answering mood and we have a lot of common questions that we thought would be good to kind of address on air as well as we put out a call on Twitter for folks to submit questions. We’ve got lots of really interesting ones, more than we’ll have time to answer, so we’ll do our best to get to as many of them as we can. You fellows ready? Let’s do it.

Yeah. So I guess we’ll start with roadmap just because that tends to be the biggest or most numerous questions are in that category, what features we building and when, but we can go from there and how people use Muse or how we use Muse, things about the broader ecosystem, tools for thought, as well as more even broader than that, some things about how our team works and even some things about Ink & Switch. So the nuts and bolts of roadmap doesn’t work for you. You can jump forward a little bit and things will get more far ranging. But yeah, starting at the beginning here, so I think a broad question many people ask, but here I’ll quote from Penny Chase who basically just said, I’d like a glimpse into the Muse roadmap, and we answered that question mark, I think a year, year and a half ago, and I think it included, you know, going local for sync and going multi-device and having desktop apps. So check, has that roadmap changed other than what we’ve accomplished since then.

00:04:30 - Speaker 3: Well, the good news is that with this launch, I think we’ve got a lot of validation on the direction that we’ve been going since day one, really, which is this idea of a tool for helping you have better ideas that spans your iPad, Mac, iPhone, eventually the web, and is very rich.

And what we’ve heard from our users, I think, is, yes, and let’s see the rest of it. And just to give a few buckets there, I think one building on the local first sync, you have the phone, that’s a pretty obvious gap for us right now, a more complete phone app, both in terms of making the phone a better tool for getting things into and out of your corpus, and also being able to look up stuff on the go.

You can also see something with the web, sharing on the web or even a full blown web client. and also building on sync. We talked during our tech episode how that’s really the foundation for collaboration, both synchronous and asynchronous, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something there. And then back in the what we call like app features, there’s some pretty standard stuff that I think we’re missing. Better search, linking, these are things that people ask for very often.

Another one I would say is more rich tech support. That’s a really foundational content site, and I could see other content types like videos and better support for free ride web pages and so on.

And then there’s a few more things I think we need in terms of like organizing and managing your content, stuff like non-spatial collections we’ve had on our list for a long time, a better inbox, which might be a variant of that. But those are, I think the main buckets on the horizon and then I still have on my medium to long term was this idea of end user programming or like scriptability, programmability more generally. I think that’s incredibly powerful and we have a really compelling foundation for that. I think we need a little bit more on the core app first.

00:06:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one way I’ve summarized it to myself and others is Muse 1 was a multimedia thinking canvas for iPad only. Muse 2 goes multi-device.

We’ve got the desktop and iPad, the local first syncing between them, phone, I think is going to be part of the 2. X series, at least that’s my hope, kind of it’s part of that vision.

It’s everywhere you need it, and then Muse 3 is where you get into the sharing collaboration, making it more than.

It will always be first and foremost a personal tool as something that is better connected to the outside world, both other humans, but also other tools through integrations and things like that.

And then yeah, maybe the end user programming feels like the, I don’t know if that’s Muse 4 or just kind of the finishing move that ties it all together.

00:06:58 - Speaker 1: In some ways I see use one as use the teenager and Muse 2 as used the college graduate, and now we have all of the education and skills and life foundation to be able to bring Muse to this great career beyond in collaboration and teams and end user programming and text formatting and we finally entered adulthood, I think, ready to go out into the workforce and make a difference in the world?

00:07:23 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Now on some specific features folks have asked about, a big one here is Zoom, being able to zoom in closer on some things, usually images or PDFs, and being able to zoom out further, especially boards as your boards get bigger and more complex, and a representative tweet on this is from our friend Marsen Igna, who says, where can I read more about why Muse has no zoom out for bird’s eye view of my board? Yeah, it clashes with the navigation gesture, but I’d love to work at 50 to 75% zoom.

00:08:01 - Speaker 1: When I think of Zoom, I think of solving at least two different problems.

The first problem is on a very large board, I want to zoom out and still be able to work and move selections around to kind of reorganize a very large desk or very large workspace.

The second problem is I’m working on a very large board, and I want to quickly jump to a different location. Scrolling is currently just kind of wandering around in the wild, and I’d really like to be able to see a map and quickly go from the bottom left to the top right or the top middle.

So I think whenever we do build Zoom, we need to think about it in that kind of context of which problem are we trying to solve? Do we find a solution that maybe can solve both problems? It’s not obvious to me which of those is the most important to start with, or the right lens to look at the feature through.

00:08:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Zoom is a very subtle challenge in Muse, just mechanically speaking, say you want to zoom out, OK, you pinch to zoom out on a board. How do we know that that’s different from wanting to zoom out to the next level up? That’s a problem we can solve, right? And you can have a quasi mode to toggle between the two, or you can have a detent in there somewhere or something. It’s just it’s quite subtle.

Another challenge with Zoom that we’ve known about since our research in the lab is with these freeform canvases, especially if you have Zoom and especially if you have infiniteness, you have this real risk of becoming lost. Like you’re looking at this solid off-white thing and it looks the same regardless of where you are and how far you are zoomed in, and people just get totally discombobulated. And so we’re trying to push back against that a little bit.

And this isn’t just a challenge for boards. We’ve also got a lot of requests for zooming into PDFs and images. So there’s a lot of stuff going on. You got zoom in, you got zoom out, you got navigation versus the document, you got different from document types, got temporary versus permanent. There’s a lot of stuff to figure out. So the answer is we just gotta sit down and do it. I think it’s very doable. It’s gonna take some time and some design work, and maybe some cutting of the Gordian not as Adam would say, you know, just get the 80% in there. I think we’ll get it done eventually.

00:10:05 - Speaker 2: We actually even discussed that as a potential thing to work on post launch. We were looking for things that would be more smaller projects, quick wins, crowd pleasers, just things to refresh our palettes after working so long on this big massive release with big data migration and so on.

And actually the conclusion we came to is it was too big of a project because we do want to think about all that stuff holistically and even if we do just carve off a small piece of it to do first, just doing a kind of boring and obvious way to do it like there’s a zoom level drop down or something like that we think will quickly create the problems that I think make a lot of other software not that enjoyable to use, which is disorientation and so on, and it’s particularly bad in the infinite canvas setting, but yeah, we need it, we badly need it as people’s boards get more sophisticated, as people are bringing in more different types of PDFs and images as they just want to do more things.

Yeah, you need the ability to zoom and we’ll solve that hopefully much sooner than later.

00:11:03 - Speaker 1: I think Zoom is also related to accessibility and potentially text size and text formatting, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But tech sizes for some users can feel a bit small in use, and being able to zoom into a board or into an image in PDF mark, as you mentioned, is also related in some ways to allowing for custom text sizes or larger headers or text formatting, just generally being able to. See content no matter what your screen size happens to be, if you’re on a small iPad or a large iPad or a big screen.

00:11:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, then we’re getting into the real Pandora’s box on the implementation side of when do you rasterize this content. If you only have one zoom level, you have a lot of flexibility and kind of do it whenever you want. But if you’re zooming all over the place, you either need to rasterize later or essentially suffer the effects of rescaling, so it’s quite gnarly.

00:11:55 - Speaker 2: A related one that’s challenging technically is dark mode. Again, another one we’ve gotten many, many requests for over the.

Well, years now, and one of my favorite stories actually, actually one of the best ways to ask for features is to tell a story, as we would say in our podcast episode about storytelling, attaching something to a story makes it much more memorable. So one story I remember well was someone writing that they were on an international flight, you know, overnight flight, 10 hours, 12 hours or something, and they spent the whole session basically with Muse and they had a bunch of PDFs loaded up and deep reading and deep thinking, perfect opportunity for that, right? But they’re in this darkened cabin. They turn their screen brightness down, but it’s just still too bright and they’re kind of afraid of waking the other passengers and so on.

00:12:44 - Speaker 2: Oh, that’s such a vivid image just blasting the cabins, but many folks have asked for it for similar reasons or just because they like dark mode.

But because we have the zooming interface that uses what we call internally snapshots, which are basically those thumbnails you see of the boards that give you this, you have this scaling transition, this sense of seamless zoom and traveling around in this kind of open world where you’re never loading a document or what have you, and that’s very nice, but the snapshot rendering. actually pretty CPU intensive.

You see this also, if you log in to a new device like an iPad with an account that has a lot of data in it and it downloads it all, the downloading it may take a while, but then generating all the snapshots actually will also cause your device to be pretty busy for a while if you have a lot of boards and deeply nested boards and so on. And so dark mode has the problem that, OK, now we basically need to generate new snapshots for every single board and do we keep both of them all, you know, do we make two all the time and slow down every regeneration every time you change something for a feature that maybe most people won’t ever use. Or is it when you switch modes, do we turn on the regeneration and suddenly your iPad is heating up and you grinding the CPU for 5 minutes while it tries to re-render everything and maybe you just want to check it quickly and then you switch it back and now it’s grinding again for another 5 minutes, so totally solvable, but I guess it’s, as with many things because we have this unique zooming interface and nested boards, that’s something that sets me apart, makes it unique and pretty special to my mind. But it also can make what seem like basic features much harder.

00:14:17 - Speaker 1: I use Zoho mail for my male client and their dark mode. It was an interesting choice because they need to be able to support dark mode for attachments that anyone can send and so it’s not only their own interface, but they’re trying to create a dark mode for the content of the email itself and what they settled on was for those attachments to literally invert the colors, which was functional but a bit jarring.

00:14:51 - Speaker 2: When greens turn into purples and everything else, and so there’s er colors can be really funky, especially like a picture of a face, for example.

00:14:56 - Speaker 1: Yes, exactly, yeah, photos or anything else, and so I’m not sure what their heuristic was for when to invert the image and when to lead the image in plain color. There were certainly some surprises when I first turned that on.

00:15:12 - Speaker 2: Another frequent request is search. A representative question here was asked by Josh Job, who asks, Are there plans for search inside the app, i.e., text? I worry I won’t be able to find anything if I can’t search the contents of blocks if I go big on muse.

00:15:28 - Speaker 1: I look at search As a navigation feature, almost more than anything else.

Back in the very olden days of the internet, there was the Yahoo directory, and you just manually search down into homeownership, lawn care, to find the nearest nursery to get some plants, whereas now you just go to Google and you say find me cheap plants.

I think the same thing for M where a lot of navigation is pinch in, pitch out, pinch in, pinch out, trying to find. Where you want to go and muse and search. Has this ability to jump very quickly from one side of your tree to the other side of your tree and back, and Supporting the content, both PDF content, text block content, and really making as rich of a search as possible. I think it is really gonna open up new workflows inside of Muse, and something I’m particularly excited about.

00:16:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I would emphasize that I think search is really important for navigation as well as the more obvious use case of finding stuff, especially on the desktop where you have a keyboard.

So if I want to go to my to do list and muse, it should be like command PTO enter all in one flow, 100 milliseconds or so and I’m there. And by the way, search should be. Much faster and better in use because of local first data.

A huge issue that you have with search on most apps, traditional SAS apps that they got to go to whatever Virginia and, you know, query the database and then come back. And then when you load the actual page, you gotta go all the way back again and get the data. This should all be able to happen locally within a few tens of milliseconds. So there’s really no excuse for searching out to be awesome and you just need to spend a little bit of time on it.

00:17:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely slop that one as it’s important, we definitely want it.

Everyone asks for it. Now it’s a matter of when does it, you know, when does it bubble up on the priority list of all the stuff we want to do.

I will go ahead and reference something you and I have talked about before, Mark, just because it was, I think pretty foundational.

We started Us, which is a book called The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff where they do a pretty thorough academic survey of basically how people use computers over the last 20 to 30 years.

And looking at files and search through things like Google and searching on your local computer and so forth, and there’s a lot of predictions of either tagging or search or other things kind of killing the file system and well if you kind of maybe hinted in that direction, which is we don’t need a Yahoo style directory of the internet anymore because we have Google.

But I think the total sum of human knowledge of Google or Wikipedia or something is a little bit in a different category from my own stuff and spatial navigation and particularly the sense that things live in a place.

This was one of the takeaways from the research in that book as well, which was things like symbolic links, for example, outside of file references where you basically can have a pointer.

To file in multiple places, the vast majority of even relatively power users didn’t use these or didn’t use them much because it actually is very powerful for our brains, spatial memory to say I know where this lives. It’s 3 folders deep. I get to it from here.

And certainly I think that can be heavily supplemented by things like search or tagging or other ways to get at your data and providing more approaches is good, but we felt like the foundation of the spatial navigation is actually going back to something that has proven to just work incredibly well for personal data sets.

00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I do think the main use case of search is going to be, I basically know this thing exists and probably even know where it is. I just don’t want to traverse the whole mind palace. I want to teleport with my search command right to where I know what it is. There will be some cases where you are actually doing a legit keyword search and just I’m not sure what, if anything, you have in your corpus about that. Yeah, the navigation is really important.

00:19:26 - Speaker 1: Using search to jump into a document, feels very natural to me, and I’m switching context and starting a new task, and then once I’m in that task, I think it’s more natural, uh, Wiggins, as you mentioned, to walk around the mine palace and just pinch in, pinch out and stay in that context because A search result in jumping through search feels very jarring sometimes to switch context so suddenly inside of the app, and I don’t know, we’ll leave it there because it’s not fully baked in my mind.

00:20:03 - Speaker 3: I do think there’s a very interesting question around what is the flavor of search.

The default way to do it is that search is a feature. It’s like this little box up in the corner and you type things and then a medium sized box appears with links and you click on a link and then you go back and tap.

We’ve long had this idea, again, going all the way back to the lab. of search that’s more integrated into the flow and capabilities of the app. So just to give you an idea, you can imagine, I’m not promising to do this, but you can imagine you have a search view, which is like a card and can be saved and persisted and moved and shared and resized within your corpus. It’s like a magic card. You type in the top of the card, and as you’re typing, the view changes to present different subsets of your corpus, which you can then teleport through to go to those rooms, if you will. But then you can do stuff like save this search, you know, I want to save all my long chair references on a card so I can go back to them later. That’s pretty cool. And you can also start to imagine. All the things you’re building around search, like the results for you as being a capability that’s general to the rest of the app. Things like seeing a view over your data is something you want elsewhere. So for example, we’ve talked about the idea of an archive. That should just be like a different view. It’s like search is the lead equals true and you might have some sugar in the app around that to make it easier and more standard to access that. But I like the idea of searches as building powerful generalized views versus a very specialized feature and wanting to get that right is I think why we’ve Delete a little bit on implementing it.

00:21:36 - Speaker 2: Daniel Rivera writes, uses my new go to for brainstorming, love how simple it is for quick ideas and sketches on the iPad, but I do wish it had inking for desktop. Is that coming?

00:21:48 - Speaker 1: I would love for it too. There’s no technical reason we can’t have ink on the desktop.

All the code is obviously shared between the iPad and the Mac.

I think the big question is, what does that input mechanism look like? Is there a way to Use the trackpad for ink input. Is that something where the the mouse is generally very bad at organic ink lettering if it’s anything beyond just a simple line or a simple arrow. Another thing we’ve talked about is using Wacom tablets and stylus tablets that I think could be very promising, but is obviously fairly niche use case for a subset of users, but I think it would be a very powerful way to bring ink into the Mac.

00:22:36 - Speaker 2: You know, one interesting thing is we already support that, not kind of on purpose, but we’ve had a number of folks write in to say, hey, I see that I can ink on Mac with my Wacom tablet, but I can’t, I don’t know what, get out the inkwer or you know, it’s sort of like partial because it just so happens that the input events that it sends is the same as the Apple pencil and we respond to that.

So we’ve done nothing explicit to support it and it’s kind of doesn’t work great. You could imagine if we had a lot of demand there, we would put the effort in to make that work.

Yeah I agree drawing with a mouse is just the worst freeform drawing even with a trackpad.

What I do think we might want is first of all, just highlighting, which could be highlighting of text, highlighting of cards. Craft does a really great job at this. Just a very simple way to add colors. Colors can give you context or they just brighten up your document, which is nice. But I think you can also look at something like a diagramming tool where you’re drawing, say, arrows between elements or you’re making a connection between them like an OO. So I think those things would make sense on the desktop, the idea of just being able to kind of circle something or try to handwrite something really hard for me to imagine there’s anything we can do there that would have a feel that would be acceptable from our perspective.

00:23:50 - Speaker 1: I’m glad you brought up the mind mapping because that’s, I think the most common scenario for me on the Mac. is wanting to draw just a very quick line between two cards, or a very quick box around a couple of cards.

It’s a feature Leonard has been experimenting with some various designs to start connecting cards and create a bit more of a mind map and I think there is a way that we can create some of these features in a mouse friendly and Mac friendly way.

That’s also balanced with not trying to create too many tiny little features or expand Muse into a grab bag of a billion features. I think the simplicity of Muse is extremely important, and so balancing what each platform is able to do and what each platform is designed to do, is a very delicate balance between supporting literally every use case on every platform. And optimizing for specific use cases on specific platforms.

00:24:46 - Speaker 2: If it starts to feel like a technical drawing tool with a huge toolbar and lots of options, and let’s see, I just want to draw an arrow between two things. Do I use the loose, you know, wire-like connection? Do I use the structured arrow? Do I use ink and draw an actual arrow? And if you find yourself making choices like that in the moment, I think that’s really gets in the way of your thinking process. So yeah, it has to be balanced against our kind of overall mission and design values.

00:25:15 - Speaker 3: Also part of the thinking here is about inking on the desktop as in Mac and inking on the desktop as in your office desk.

And part of the original idea with Muse was that you have these different complimentary devices, and they’re not only used at disjoint times, you might actually use them at the same time.

I was actually just rummaging in my archives from like 5 years ago yesterday, and I was looking at one of the original presentations I did about what would eventually become used, and we had this idea of you have A desktop like a Mac, and then right in front of you, basically where your keyboard is, you have an iPad and you’re using your Mac for the big heads up display and seeing all these PDFs and so on.

And then when you want to do a little drawing that you insert into your presentation, for example, you just draw that on your iPad because that’s the device that’s better for that.

So, that’s not to say we shouldn’t have some sort of inking capability in the map, but I would also just point out that there’s this possibility of running two devices at the same time.

We might need to add a little bit more kind of smoothness to make that even better, but that’s a possibility as well.

00:26:17 - Speaker 2: I do that with some frequency, actually, I’ll kind of convert my desk chair from the sitting upright mode, good posture, you know, 90 degree knees, feet flat on the ground, which I’ll use when I’m typing and using the mouse, and I’ll kind of convert it to the leaning way back mode, stick my feet up on the desk and have kind of my iPad and my pencil in my lap, but I still have muse up on the big monitor. I can see it live updating as I’m going and often see a bigger view, just have a much bigger monitor of the board I’m moving around.

But yeah, if we wanted to put more effort into supporting that simultaneous use case, one for me that would take a lot of friction out would be having the iPad be on the same, you know, when I open it, it’s on the same board that my desktop is on, but maybe not everyone wants that feature. Maybe you actually want to keep them on different ones, so I don’t know that would need some thought.

00:27:05 - Speaker 3: Well, maybe you should be able to make a search card that’s recently seen boards and put that in your inbox.

00:27:12 - Speaker 2: Smart. So another category of feature request is web sharing, and we’ve got a few examples here, including InterPlato ask or board shareable and navigable on the web with a shared link, and then Nikita, who asks, I wish to have notion like level of control on which canvas and which depth I want to share a link. My biggest barrier to using Muse is that I want to share my research as I do it.

00:27:37 - Speaker 1: This is something we’ve experimented with pre-sync that was very useful for a number of users, and I think post-sync we’re finally in a place where we can start thinking about this again.

One of the limits in the presync era was the web share was fully static, and there was just no ability for anyone reading it to add comments or certainly to add content, whereas now post-sync.

We can imagine a web viewer that is a full client of Muse that is able to interact with and sync content back up into your corpus, and so you can share feedback, get comments and content from your team, and have that go straight back into your muse. And so I think that’s a powerful team and collaboration feature that we’re certainly thinking about that sync has finally given us the foundation to support.

00:28:32 - Speaker 2: I’ll note from that earlier very brief beta test we did where we just gave it to a few folks, the ability to kind of share a pretty static, basically they kind of dumped your muse board to Kind of like static image, static HTML page was not the lack of interactivity or not even being able to add comments, but actually just that it wasn’t live.

So I think one of the things we get with the modern web conception of real-time collaboration, Google Docs, figMotion, etc. is that a URL becomes a place where you know you’re always seeing the latest version of something. So we do quite a bit of news board sharing internally. And actually a lot of times folks send us news boards either as, you know, PNG exports or full board bundles with feedback on the app or other comments, which we love. So it’s a great format for sharing work in progress and thinking with your colleagues, but it never fails, right? You go to share it, you know, I’ll just post it in a slack as an upload, which is a little clunky, but whatever, and then I realized I need to change three things that I left out or that are wrong. And I’m going back and deleting it from Slack and hoping that, you know, no one’s downloaded it yet and uploading it again, and this of course the whole world of email file attachments and finalfin2. doc and so on. So I think to me that’s why we kind of sunsetted that little experiment, the early shared web experiment, but now we do have the technology foundation for a live, even if it’s completely static, all you can do is navigate through it and maybe copy paste stuff in and out. If it’s live updating and you know you’re looking at the latest version, that is a game changer.

Alright, so one last roadmap question here is about linking hyperlink or wiki or Rome style linking. So one example of someone who asked us is Robert Haysfield, who says any plans on enabling users to place the same board in multiple boards? I struggled before trying to use Muse because I don’t know, hierarchical organization without an ability to bridge trees makes it difficult for me to find things and pick up where I left off. So I think for sure linking you know Ted Nelson’s excellent branding with hyperlinking in the web is obviously hugely empowering. We saw it in wikis. I think Notion is the modern version of a team wiki and then Rome with its kind of invented the category of, personal knowledge graphs, back linking. Now there’s a whole profusion of apps that do this really, really well, often with the double bracket kind of linking format. And yeah, I’m happy to say on that one, we’re actually working on it right now. So for those of you who are prom members, keep an eye on your backstage pass, some goodies coming up there soon.

00:31:04 - Speaker 1: The Backstage pass on this one is gonna be a really helpful piece of feedback for us to hear from customers what they think of this linking feature, cause there’s a few different ways we’ve looked at building it.

I know Yuli and Leonard are taking the lead on this, and It’s a lot more complicated than just, oh, put a link down, you click it and you go.

There’s a lot of nuance in how those links are presented and How the content appears in a link and in a backlink, particularly because, at least for me, a lot of my boards don’t have titles.

That’s probably a personal failure of myself, but linking to something that does not have a title, there’s not much metadata there, and so, showing a piece of the board you’re linking into is important, but then it gets a little confusing because it looks like a normal card, and so how do you tell the difference between a linked card and a normal unlinked card that’s not a mirror.

So there’s a lot of nuance and kind of how these things are displayed and so the Feedback we get from customers in the Backstage Pass is really gonna help us to iron out all of those little details to make sure that this is not only as powerful as the linking features we all expect, but really fits within the music universe and fits within all of the rest of our content in a tidy way.

00:32:25 - Speaker 2: So another big category of questions is using Muse, and this is a place I feel we’ve underinvested, which is that you can’t get a lot of information beyond the mechanics of how to use the app, but in terms of how people use it, and we have some projects in the works on that to try to better showcase what people’s boards look like and what the different kinds of uses you might use muse for and what things Muse is not a good fit for, but a few questions here that folks raised. The first one is from Alex Antozek. Who says, how often do you guys use Muse for non-muse related work?

00:33:02 - Speaker 1: Most recently, I started using Muse for custom keyboard organization.

So I’ve entered the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards and building your own keyboards. I’ve recently come up for air, and I’m just using my regular laptop keyboard, but I think I’m gonna fall back down and fight the dragon again soon.

But Muse has been very, very helpful because there’s 1000 parts and there’s 1000 versions of each part, and Linking to a random Amazon link just does not give enough context for what it is that I’m actually looking at. And so Muse has been very helpful. I can put it in a photo, a short description, a link, and some context about each of the different parts and each of the different steps of construction. So using Muse to organize all of those different parts and be able to physically see photos of them next to the link next to the description has been a really helpful way to map out that rabbit trail that I have found myself getting lost in.

00:34:02 - Speaker 2: You’re just looking over my current news home board, I think it’s about a 50/50 split, kind of depends on what big personal projects I have going on.

You know, on the work side I have things like a little editorial calendar for the podcast, upcoming guests and things. We’ve got the chapter plan board that basically Leonard led the planning session and produced the shared board.

I’d like to be able to go back and reference that things about Twitter, I draft all our shareholder updates there.

I have a whole board that’s not news related, but it’s kind of career related, which is I which held a lovely un conference recently, and I have a bunch of notes from all the talks there and so on.

Then on the personal side, I have things like, I don’t know, the Kita, that is to say the kindergarten daycare that my daughter attends, you know, they sent out a PDF that’s, here’s the days we’re off this summer, and you know, in some cases I excerpt out the like coming up month, especially when it’s a critical, OK, we’ve got the summer holiday, and how does that match up to our summer holiday and this sort of thing.

But also holiday planning for sure. I mean, travel planning. It is, you know, in some ways a fairly basic use case, but it’s really helpful though you have pictures and maps and PDFs of tickets and it’s all in one place.

I do personal journaling, you know, just classic daily pages, sit down and write out what’s on your mind in the morning.

And then bigger projects, for example, when I was searching for a home a couple of years ago and eventually made a home purchase, but that is a place where the sharing and collaboration capabilities would be a big help because there I was doing it with someone else, my partner, and so I kind of have my personal world that’s inside Muse, but at some point we need to share and I can’t really share it directly with her, so then we kind of have some stuff stuck in an ocean or a Google doc somewhere, but that’s really awkward. So, yeah, when I have a bigger project, something like that, home improvement, yeah, personal hobbies, that sort of thing, that tends to occupy a big portion of my home board.

00:35:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I also really like Muse for personal projects, and one of my favorite pieces of it is that you can use it from the very beginning, where you’re just literally sketching out, you’re jotting down ideas, you’re taking little scribbling notes, and that board can evolve over time as you add text and PDFs and web links and images, and that rich multimedia is so important for these projects I find I can’t imagine going back to a world with just one content type. I also use Muse just for my to do list, that’s probably my heaviest use case.

I’m in there every day, and that’s mostly just text, but it’s not all texts, you know, every once in a while there’s like, whatever, you gotta call the plumber, so you put the link for the plumber’s page on your to do list or what have you.

And also just like that it’s two dimensional so that you don’t just have one. Huge multi-page linear list, which is, I don’t know demoralizing for me. So I have on the top left, it’s like today’s most important stuff, and then way off on the right side is, you know, longer term stuff, and you can just kind of move stuff in two dimensions. So, I like it for that. I also use Muse as my reading buffer. So for links and PDFs, I have a big per month reading board, and I kind of queue up stuff there and then maybe once on the weekend, I go and read it all and then archive that board and go back next month and so on.

00:37:08 - Speaker 2: Mm. One I’ve seen from a number of customers is making a daily reading board where it’s actually a link or a PDF and some notes or thoughts that was generated by that. It could even just be like a half a sentence scribble, nothing too complex or this made me think of this other thing, or here’s a tweet that’s connected to this, and they just make one per day and it just scrolls vertically or horizontally, and then they just like kind of accumulate these over time. And it’s a way to synthesize ideas and get more out of what you read and pull together the sparks of inspiration that you’re getting from consuming the information hot fire hose.

So when we’ve heard frequently and I think we even addressed this in the last listener questions episode, but maybe it’s worth touching on here is basically about the home board and how you structure things or organize things there without explicit work workspaces. So a lot of apps, notion, craft, even Apple Notes or something like that will have kind of top level workspaces where you say, here’s my daily notes, and here’s my to do’s and here’s my stuff for work, and here’s my home.

Improvement projects and you kind of bucket things that way and they find it surprising maybe that you have the top level home board, it’s just like any other board, it’s a free form thing you can put stuff however you want. You can make neatly organized, you can scroll vertically, stroll horizontally, scroll both ways, you can have a lot of stuff, a little stuff, it’s like completely up to you. What’s our answer on that one?

00:38:39 - Speaker 3: So in terms of home organization, I tend to have two dimensions going on. The first dimension is more obvious, which is, it tends to be organized by projects, ish or domain.

But there’s also an organization along the dimension of like recency or proximity to the cash. It’s like the things that I’m currently and actively working on.

So what I end up having is I have a few boards, both work and personal, that I’m very actively working on. And then I have a few more like archival boards that are more defined in terms of the domain. So I might have a board for my today’s to do list and a board for today’s reading, and a board for whatever my personal project is for this week. And then I have my muse board and my personal board, and I might even have, if I’m just a little bit discombobulate that day, I might even have just a few things blasted on the top level, like here’s a PDF that I want to read, and here’s a, you know, repro case from a youth book I’m working on.

And what happens is things filter down through this cache hierarchy over time. And this is a good example of how we didn’t want to have too prescriptive a setup in terms of workspaces. Like if we just said you have to divide your corpus into workspaces, it wouldn’t work for having the second dimension of the cash hierarchy.

Also just kind of go into the philosophy of why we don’t have a separate construct for workspaces. It’s kind of echoes the thing I was saying earlier about search cards, like we wanted you to have the full richness and power of muse to be able to organize your top level in the same way that you would be able to organize your individual boards. Like you have all these capabilities around, you know, freeform boards and inking and multimedia and different sizes. Like why should you have to throw that out the window just because it’s the top level? That seems exactly backwards.

00:40:16 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of we talked about a very similar philosophical point with Pallo a couple episodes back where basically on sketch they originally had kind of an art board template editor that was a standalone thing but you quickly realized you wanted to do all the things to the templates that you wanted to do to a regular art board, so eventually they made it so you could just name an art board as a template and then whatever you do to that art board.

Goes into the template and then you don’t need to make a duplicate editor but worse.

And I think there’s something similar where if we’d make a top-level workspace, OK, you need to be able to move stuff, delete stuff, you probably want to duplicate things, and at some point you go, wait a minute, I want to just do all the same things I can do in my subboards.

00:41:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, now in fairness to them, many, many users who keep requesting this, I don’t think it’s just that people don’t understand this possibility of generalized boards being used at the top level.

I think there is some sense in which the current freeform spatial boards aren’t the best fit for some top level use cases.

If logically, you just want to split your space into A, B, and C, and you want that to be Coherent regardless of what device you’re on or what size you’re looking at or whatever, or as you add and remove top level spaces that having to manually manage that on a spatial board isn’t exactly right.

And this comes to the topic of spatial collections, which we’ve had on the radar for a long time. And you can imagine a spatial collection working as follows. You put end things into the non-spatial collection, it’s like a folder basically, and then Muse automatically sizes and arranges these objects as appropriate, sort of like math finder.

You can imagine it it sizes and arranges them and lines them up or whatever in a nice way. And if we had that primitive, I think a lot of users would opt to use that at the top level where they’re currently asking for the separate workspaces feature.

But importantly, such a non-spatial collection could also be used all over the place. For example, my reading board should probably be a non-spatial collection, it’s a little goofy to have to manually manage literally 100 PDFs on a board.

Um, there’s kind of like weirdly overlapping in places and whatever.

And also, by the way, coming back to our search discussion, that should probably just be. A view that dynamically produces a non-spatial collection. So this is another example of how you get the right primitives and they can apply in a lot of different places, including this top of workspace idea.

00:42:32 - Speaker 1: I think one thing that’s interesting about the way I’ve organized my home board is.

I have all of the projects that I care about visible when I’m fully scrolled to the top left corner, and then the priority is based on kind of the size of the card, and so my personal card is fairly large for family and that sort of thing, work, I often go into that, that’s a larger board. Then I have lots of much smaller boards.

But then I’m able to actually hide less important boards outside of the scroll visible area, which is nice because some of those boards are important, but they kind of stress me out because I just don’t want to think about that project right now. And when that project shows up, I think, oh my gosh, I haven’t finished that project, and my heart starts racing.

00:43:14 - Speaker 2: And so if I just hide it out of view, tuck it off camera, exactly.

00:43:16 - Speaker 1: It’s, you know, out of sight, out of mind. I don’t have very much object permanence for some of these projects that are a bit more discouraging that they’re still around. And so, that’s been another nice thing for me, it’s just a trick to be able to focus on certain projects that I can see, and then when I don’t want to focus on it anymore, I can put it physic