Metamuse

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There’s been very little innovation and research more generally into what is a good interface for inputting equations. So I think most people are probably familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel have these equation editors where you basically open this palette and there is a preview and there is a button for every possible mathematical symbol or operator you can imagine. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by our guest Sarah Lim, who goes by Slim. Hello, hello, and Slim, you’ve got various interesting affiliations including UC Berkeley, Notion, Inc and Switch, but what I’m interested in right now is the lessons you’ve learned from playing classic video games. Tell me about that. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: So this arose when I was deciding whether to get the 14 inch or 16 inch M1 MacBook Pro and a critical question of our age, let’s be 00:01:10 - Speaker 1: honest. Exactly, exactly. I couldn’t decide. I posted a request for comments on Twitter, and then I had this realization that when I was 6 years old playing Organ Trail 5, which is a remake of Organ Trail 2, which is itself a remake of the original. I was in the initial outfitting stage, and you have 3 choices for your farm wagon. You can get the small farm wagon, the large farm wagon, and the Conestoga wagon. I actually don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly, but let’s assume I am. So I just naively chose the Conestoga wagon because as a 6 year old, I figured that bigger must be better and being able to store more supplies for your expedition would make it more successful. I eventually learned that the fact that the wagon is much larger and can store a lot more weight means that it’s a lot easier to overload it. Among other things, this requires constantly abandoning supplies to cut weight. It makes the roover forwarding minigame much more perilous. It’s a lot harder to control the wagon. And yeah, I never chose that wagon again on subsequent playthroughs, and I decided to get the 14-inch laptop. 00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Makes perfect sense to me and and what a great lesson for a six year old trade-offs, I feel like it’s one of the most important kind of fundamental concepts to understand as a human in this world, and I think many folks struggle with that well into adulthood. At least I feel like I’ve often been in certainly business conversations where trying to explain trade-offs is met with confusion. 00:02:35 - Speaker 1: They should just play Organ Trail. 00:02:37 - Speaker 2: Clearly that’s the solution. And tell us a little bit about your background. 00:02:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’ve been interested in basically all permutations really of user interfaces and programming languages for a really long time, so this includes the very different programming languages as user interfaces and programming languages for user interfaces, and then, you know, the combination of the two. So right now I’m doing a PhD in programming languages, interested in more of like the theoretical perspective, but in the past, I’ve worked on I guess, end user computing, which is really the broader vision of notion, I was at Khan Academy for a while on the long term research team. 00:03:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and there I think you worked with Andy Matuschek, who’s a good friend of ours and uh previous guest on the podcast. 00:03:24 - Speaker 1: Yes, definitely. That was the first time I worked with Andy in real depth, and I still really enjoy talking to him and occasionally collaborating with him today. So, I guess, prior to that, I was doing a lot of research at the intersection of HCI or human computer interaction and programming tools, programming systems, I guess. So, one of the big projects that I worked on as an undergrad was focused on inspecting. CSS on a webpage or more generally trying to understand what are the properties of like the code that influence how the page looks or a visual outcome of interest, and there I was really motivated by the fact that you have these software tools have their own Mental model, I guess, or just model of how code works and how different parts of the program interact to produce some output and then you have the user who has often this entirely different intuitive model of what matters, what’s important. So they don’t care if this line of code is or isn’t evaluated, they care whether it actually has a visible effect on the output. So trying to reconcile those two paradigms, I think is a recurring theme in a lot of my work. 00:04:30 - Speaker 2: And I

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Also something that makes it very unique is this like you’re you’re basically floating through space and you’re zooming deeper into your hierarchy and all of this is like a perfect illusion of seamlessness when it’s actually not seamless at all. 00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this podcast isn’t about Muse, the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name’s Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and my colleague, Julia Rogats. Hi, Adam. And Julia, you have now made 2 have 2 years in a row to spend the entire winter in a sunny location away from your home in Germany. How’s that working out for you? You can repeat that again next year? 00:00:56 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, I guess we’ll see about next year and what traveling is going to be like in the future. Um, but at least for the past 2 years, I’ve really enjoyed that. I think, I mean, I love my hometown, Berlin, um. And I love being here in the summer, but in the winter it can get quite gloomy and dark and cold, uh, and I’m very much a sun person, so, um, yeah, I’ve really been making good use of this remote company set up and you know, make your own work hours for the most part. So spending lots of time in Adventurous places, kind of splitting my workdays in half, which is something that I really like to do, get some work done in the morning and then do something nice outdoors and then work some more hours in the night. Um, it’s been really been a really nice balance for me throughout the winter time. 00:01:42 - Speaker 2: You have a very impressive ability to get stuff done while also interleaving it with adventure. You’ll, you’ll ship some major new feature and then go whale watching. 00:01:57 - Speaker 1: And then fix a bunch of bugs and then go kayaking or I’d be like, guys, I’m going to be 20 minutes late from the meeting. I’ve just got back from a scuba dive. 00:02:04 - Speaker 2: That’s yeah, absolutely. But it’s also a reflection of the kind of work environment we built. Mark and I talked about this on a previous episode of trying to make a space that is flexible. For all of the the people on the team to live the kind of life they want to live. And for you apparently scuba diving and uh whale watching and kayaking is is the life you want to live. 00:02:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely been amazing to not have to separate your life so much between like work and traveling. Like usually traveling for me always happened on vacation, um. And I actually find the mindset that I’m in uh when I travel, when I’m in a different country to be extremely stimulating in many ways and actually that to make me more productive. So being able to mix that has been quite a blessing. 00:02:47 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is iOS development, and then from you specifically, kind of our gesturerer system and why that’s so challenging to implement. But I thought maybe for contexts for people that don’t know how IS development works either because they know about software development generally, but not necessarily kind of mobile development, or even people who aren’t necessarily that familiar with how software gets built. They might like to know, what does it look like for you? You sit down in the morning or maybe the afternoon to work on some features or fix some bugs, you’re going to start crafting muse out of artisanal ones and zeros. What does that actually physically look like? What devices are you using? What software are you using? 00:03:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so in terms of devices, I use a MacBook first and foremost, as far as I know, you still can’t develop iOS or Mac software on any other platform. So that’s where everything starts and it comes with the with the IDE basically to develop for the iPad or iPhone, which is called X code. 00:03:51 - Speaker 2: IDE being integrated development environment. 00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yes, correct. Uh, so basically it’s kind of the entire tool kit that you need to write software for the iPad or the iPhone. You write all your code there, you compile it there, you debug it there. So what I usually do um is that I plug in the actual physical iPad. The XO also comes with a simulator and you can run all of your um iOS apps in the simulator itself. So basically just brings up a little screen on your computer that looks like an iPad or an iPhone and you can do most things there. But for an app like ours, which is extremely gesture driven and we use the pencil for many things, it’s a bit tedious to actually um work with the simulator and some things aren’t p

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Support is one important way that you’re understanding how customers are experiencing the product and what you should be doing differently going forward. And at a more human and personal level, I think it’s important for motivating the product work, hearing from individual people about their desires for the product is quite motivating. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:38 - Speaker 1: Hey, Adam, now you’re a bit into the fatherhood journey. How’s that treating you? 00:00:45 - Speaker 2: Well, I love it. I love being a father. It’s extremely rewarding to care for a small and cute creature who basically depends on you for their every need. Also very hard work, really hard work, but we recently crossed into toddlerhood, so toddler, I think, is defined as one year and up, and actually that was a big transition because the Under one year, essentially the needs of the kid, especially as you get close to the early side of that one year, is completely different from adults, right? They’re drinking milk, maybe from a bottle, maybe from mom, how you bathe them, even when they are eating semi-s solid food, their needs are just utterly different from that of an adult, how they sleep, everything like that. But now that we’re into the toddler age, I’m finding it’s more like a very small and non-capable and gets tired easily and has a limited palate adult, but in a sense, you know, they can eat a lot of the same food, they kind of need to sleep at kind of somewhat similar times, so that’s actually quite nice and you add in the walking. And then you know potentially the talking and now yeah it’s less of a guessing game trying to fulfill the mostly physical needs of this creature and starts to advance into fulfilling their emotional needs and eventually their intellectual needs. So I’m finding that at a minimum sort of easier and less stressful, but also in a lot of ways a lot more fun. So yeah, it’s been really nice and it’s also a place where I think I really appreciate the very flexible work environment we’ve created for you, even though I did take off some parental leave time. I just assumed at some point I would need to take a bigger chunk, but that hasn’t actually really happened because I’ve been able to interleave childcare with my work. Now part of that is a lot of my colleagues are based in the states and so those meetings happen in the evening and So my daughter’s in bed then, but this is a good example I feel of where the flexible working environment that we’ve take quite a bit of effort to craft really starts to pay off. 00:02:42 - Speaker 1: That’s perhaps the most important testament to the flexible schedule we’ve heard yet. It’s awesome. 00:02:48 - Speaker 2: Well we can jump straight into our topic today, which is support. Now, of course, it’s always good to start with a little bit of a definition, and support is something I feel strongly about. I guess I feel strongly about all the pieces of what makes up a good company, or from my perspective, what makes a strong technology company, all these different functions that need to work together, engineering, design, marketing, and so on. But I feel like support is one that maybe doesn’t get its Do or doesn’t quite have the prestige of the others or something like that. Everyone agrees it’s really important, but you don’t think of working for a company in a support role necessarily as cool, maybe as being, I don’t know, a designer or something, and I find that a little bit unfortunate. 00:03:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think support is often underestimated, and I’m glad we’ll be digging into it today. So Adam, what does support mean for you exactly? 00:03:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I would define support as getting help with a specific problem you have with the product or maybe getting a question answered, but it’s something where you can’t do that through the sort of more automated means and you need to go to a call it a human interaction, you’re sort of contacting the company and maybe that line gets blurred a little bit with AI chatbot support thingies, but I think it’s you’re in this state where you have a problem to solve, you can’t figure out how to do it, and probably for every person that moment where you Give up and contact support happens at a different point. I’m more of an exhaust every other option, read all the documentation, Google about it, try to figure it out on my own before I usu

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Titles of books are probably one of the best sources of inspiration for messaging. Book covers are so inspiring to me because it’s a visual and a title and the title’s so short and it captures the entire thesis of the book. 00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. 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 McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Joined today by Hilary Maloney. Hi. And Hillary, we on the Muse team often like to work from interesting, inspiring nature locations with sometimes limited internet connectivity. Hui in particular is famous for this, at least on our team. I understand that while you were working with us recently on a project, you got to do a little work in the less connected parts of California. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I spent a lot of my time climbing and traveling around California in a camper van and got to do quite a bit of this project, traveling down in Bishop and I’d work in the mornings out of the van and then kind of go about my day. So it’s really cool to work, you know, flexibly with this team and see that you guys have that as part of your working style. 00:01:24 - Speaker 2: Now, how do you fit together your day kind of interleaving, obviously these very different activities of going out into, I guess bouldering is the, the official term for it. Yeah, exactly. Sort of going out and doing that, which I’m just gonna assume in my head that it’s like this documentary Free Solo that you look exactly like that guy climbing up the side of the mountain there in Yosemite, but do you do that kind of like you like to work early and then do the physical stuff later or the inverse? How do you put it together? 00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m definitely a morning person, so I like to get up really early, especially when I’m camping, you know, if you’ve ever been camping, you naturally wake up at like 5 a.m. And so I like to get a few hours of work in the morning when my brain is fresh and then kind of go about my day and being really physical and active, I think is almost part of my process. We can talk about that more, but I think, you know, being in your body is so important to doing creative work and having ideas. And so yeah, I tend to kind of start in the morning and then that physical experience is really important for me. 00:02:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, same here, and I think I didn’t realize that and I don’t know, my twenties maybe when I was, you know, get my career started and was more about being at the computer and being focused, but later, yeah, that in your body, as well as maybe almost paint that as the inverse, which is actually getting out of your head, which is when you do very intellectual work all the time and you’re almost unaware of your body, almost to the detriment of your physical health. But if you go do something particularly that’s really demanding, whether it’s something like bouldering, for me, a really intensive hike, for example, with a lot of elevation change or run, anything like that, it sort of forces you to leave the higher plane of your mind and go to a more primal state, but I think that actually is better for when you return to your mind, somehow your ideas and your creativity has rearranged itself. I don’t know, it’s like, there’s something to it there. 00:03:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I feel very seen by that. It’s kind of a necessary part of the life, you know, and doing hard complex work, and I’m definitely drawn to, as you described, those very intense experiences as well. Even sometimes walking isn’t enough. I need to run or surf or climb or something that’s like very physically demanding, and you’re exactly right. It’s really about getting out of your mind as much as it is getting into your body. 00:03:56 - Speaker 2: And tell us about your background and in particular, maybe even how you would label what you do. I think I’ve heard you refer to yourself as a strategist. Tell us what you do and how you came to do that. 00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m a brand strategist and researcher. My background is really in kind of classical brand marketing and advertising. So I’ve spent a lot of my career working in advertising agencies, but I also really love working with startups, so I do a lot of side projects as well. And I really think of myself as a marketing generalist. Maybe you guys feel this in software, but I think a lot of fields are becoming super super specialized and there’s routes you kind of take to specialize in your career and I’ve tried to stay really broad, so I do quite a lot of of marketin

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 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

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You want to achieve mastery in some sense in your life. So all these things come together and for some people, community becomes very addictive. I’ve certainly been in communities about products and games, where the game or product became a. And the importance because the community in itself just became my main driver to come back to this group of people nerding out about something that I wasn’t even using or playing all that much, but I love the ideas about it. 00:00:35 - 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, joined by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest today, Ramsey Out of LogSeek. 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Hi, Adam, I’m Mark. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. 00:00:57 - Speaker 2: And I understand you started your professional life as a Spanish teacher. 00:01:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s correct. When I finished my associate degree, I was about 16 years old here in the Netherlands. You’d leave high school very early, so 16 years old, I started my associate degree and then finished when I was 18. So I enrolled in college, did a double degree in Spanish language and culture, and then also teaching it, and that is basically what, yeah, triggered. The obsession with learning and specifically learning languages, so both natural languages and computer languages. That is how it all started, all the sleepless nights trying to figure out why something is not working or why I don’t understand something. 00:01:43 - Speaker 2: Can I assume you probably fell down the space repetition on key rabbit hole at some point. 00:01:49 - Speaker 1: I’m still hooked 15 years after discovering it, so I just finished before we started this call, I just finished my 100+ Italian repetitions, which I’m now doing, so I’m learning Italian through immersion, flashcards, and a lot of TV shows, so, yeah. 00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Netflix has definitely been a very big boon to language learners, particularly with their very solid audio and subtitle selections and the ability to rewind and relisten when you didn’t quite catch something, and so on. 00:02:19 - Speaker 1: And the tools build on top of that, so there are actually tools that will let you capture subtitles with a screenshot. I think there’s even options to capture the audio, like a piece of audio with it. So, yeah, definitely the tools in the last decade have definitely made language learning easier. Obviously the flashcard tools, but also note taking tools, obviously, as you dive deeper into a language, really make it a study project. That is basically, I started with the flashcards and then I moved more and more towards the personal knowledge management nerding out over the more intricate parts of the languages that I was learning. 00:03:01 - Speaker 2: I guess I can see the path there. This is the part where I’d normally ask what was the path that brought you to lugs seek, but I think that almost answered the question a little bit, especially when you talk about the, is it the Think stack Club is your kind of online learning platform that maybe bridge the gap between those two endpoints. 00:03:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so in like very quickly run through my curriculum, so basically after graduating as a Spanish teacher and teaching for several thousands of hours because internships are very early in the Netherlands, I couldn’t find a job as a teacher. Teacher. So I ended up actually as a telemarketer for 2 years on the phone with IT managers, mostly decision makers or stakeholders in IT departments trying to get appointments like physical appointments for colleagues of mine. And I would just cold call people each and every day. That’s where my hunger for learning came in very handy because I had to learn a lot about the IT space so what companies operate, what technologies are there, so not just from a software perspective, like I knew obviously operating systems, but also servers, networks, complex systems, so I had to learn a lot. So note taking became more of a focus for me as I was on the phone, taking lots of notes. Finding basically little rabbit holes to go down to as someone would mention something like a technology on the phone, I would just say, oh yeah, oh yeah, sure, sure, and and the meanwhile I would write down some terms and then spend half an hour researching that, taking some notes, like we had an internal wiki as well because there were more guys like me who didn’t know anything. Too much about the IT like certain parts of the IT ecosystem, like the corporate IT ecosystem, and we’re eager to learn, so we’re just a bunch of guys eager to learn and pract

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Here’s my number one tip for listeners of this podcast episode. The most unreasonably effective thing to do in recruiting is to move quickly, especially as a small company where you have the ability to do that. 00:00:16 - 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 today with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And a fun little announcement here, we’re growing the Muse team, or we have grown the Muse team, I think it’s the right way to say it. So the designer storyteller position we posted a while back, we’re very pleased to welcome Linda Ma to the team as our 6th team member, and indeed we’ve also had some great candidates for what could be #7, that’s the local first engineer, so we kind of hope slash expect to have a similar announcement on that in the not too distant future. And this is what made me think it would be time to finally do an episode we’ve talked about for ages, which is on the topic of hiring or recruiting or perhaps team building. And this is something you’ve done quite a lot of, particularly a little bit of Hiroku and a ton at Stripe, and indeed you even have an article on your website, Thoughts on recruiting that I’ll link to, but maybe you can start us off by giving an overview of what you think hiring is all about and why it matters. 00:01:28 - Speaker 1: Oh, I have so much to say about recruiting, and it’s hard to believe we’ll even fit it all in close to one episode, but A couple of things I’ll say at this stage. One is that obviously the team that you build is gonna be the company that you build and the product that you end up building. It’s really the foundation. That I think is pretty obvious, but I think people often forget that. The other side of it is that this is a huge part of people’s lives. If you work, say, at 4 years for a company, that might be 5% of your mortal human life, you know, spent much of your waking time spent there. And maybe it’s a 10th of your career. So it’s a really big deal on both sides, and I don’t think that people treat it with the seriousness and importance and gravity that it deserves. Just kind of throw something up on indeed and, you know, respond to the emails or whatever. I don’t know. It just seems like such an important topic that really merits deep thought. 00:02:21 - Speaker 2: It is certainly part of the Silicon Valley culture to say hiring is, for example, hiring is job one for the CEO. That might be a phrase that someone might bandy about, but I would argue maybe some of that ends up putting a lot of emphasis on the quantity of hiring and the speed at which you do it rather than the quality and the quality not just of the candidates in terms of how they fit the company, but the team that you’re building and how it integrates and fits together and ultimately can. Do what you’re there to do, which is, you know, build the product. 00:02:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a big theme of this discussion is going to be holistically thinking about recruiting, hiring, team building, and zooming out a little bit, and it’s not just about all the little tactics, it’s really easy to get to zoomed in on that. We got to keep in mind the goal of having an effective productive team, and considering all the things that can lead up to that. 00:03:14 - Speaker 2: I think an important part of what we’re talking about here as well is that we’re obviously talking largely about hiring the technology industry, which is where all our experience is, but I think an important part of it is hiring creative people to create something that’s often fairly novel in the world, and so you really need, there’s the whole mission driven concept and being aligned and sharing values, all of these things I think are an important part of it. That’s one piece of it is I think you really need to get people who are going to put their spirits into it in a way that It’s not just do they have the skills, it’s a do their passions line up with the things the company needs. And a related thing is the immense privilege we have being in this industry, which is it’s a very in demand field and so the people who are being hired side of the equation, they have a lot of options. Not only are they well paid, but they have the luxury, you know, if you’re good at interviewing and have the right CV and everything like that, you may be able to get offers from several places. So the hiring manager is often not just kind of this doing this transaction of here’s the work that needs to be done, here’s the skill set, and h

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You can also be notified just based on an algorithm, you know, if somebody files something that’s similar to your trademark to trigger a notification to you. The interesting thing about the trademark office, at least from a government perspective, is it’s the most government 2.0 out there in the sense that the data is publicly available and can be downloaded every single day. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. M UUE is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam. And we’re joined today by Josh Gurbin of Gurban Intellectual Property. 00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, guys. 00:00:44 - Speaker 2: And Josh, I understand you have 4 kids. How in the world do you manage life work balance with that and being a business owner? 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: That is incredibly difficult. I will say that the plan was maybe not to have as many kids initially, but these are the things that happen as life goes on. And one of the great benefits I have is that I get to work from home every day. So I don’t have a commute into the office or home from the office, so I can wake up, get to work, and You know, when the kids get home from school, I have a little time, but, you know, I’m not wasting an hour or 2 hours a day commuting to and from an office in a big city and having that time back is really the critical element I think in making it all work. 00:01:23 - Speaker 2: That’s huge. Now have you found some good techniques for communicating boundaries around your office slash, you’re on a call or just need to focus, especially, you know, I don’t know how old your kids are, but the younger they are, the less they understand, you know, closed door means you can’t come in. 00:01:39 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, so in my house we actually have an office, you know, that I work from that’s dedicated for me and everybody understands that the doors closed, you know, you just don’t come in, I’ll come out when I’m ready, and luckily, you know, when you work from home and you talk about those boundaries with your kids every day, they really understand what you’re doing. Now, of course, there’s gonna be a situation here and there where they run in and They probably shouldn’t be, but the benefit of COVID is so many people have had to work from home and deal with that now that it’s not unusual for anybody to kind of see a kid running around on a call here and there, so it’s almost an enduring quality these days, so I find it works pretty well and for the most part, you know, we’re able to sort of separate in our house. 00:02:17 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, I almost wonder, yeah, every time my kids run in and jumps in front of the screen and everyone sees her, you know, it’s obviously always like a very positive reaction, but I almost wonder if that’s a positive reinforcement for what ultimately is not a good behavior, which is, you know, violating the boundary of the closed door or the workspace. But yeah, then you can’t resist it. Everyone’s just entertained to see an unexpected cute face pop up on the screen. 00:02:42 - Speaker 1: And honestly, if you have kids, you appreciate what’s going on and you understand what’s going on, and I think that that’s something that, you know, to me it doesn’t bother me if I’m talking to somebody and their kids budging. I like to see what their life is like. I like to see that they’re a human being too, right? And I think that that humanizing aspect of things can even make relationships stronger between people. So I personally have no issue with it, and I think if somebody does and they’re probably got ice in their veins, you know, it’s. 00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little about your firm and your background. 00:03:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, so I started the law firm in 2008 in the middle of the Great Recession. I had a steady job, a good job at the time. I was 2 years out of law school and everybody thought I was absolutely crazy as 27 years old and they’re like, you’re gonna start your own law firm? I mean, most people don’t want to hire a lawyer and it looks like he’s 12 years old and I definitely looked like I was 12 years old at the time, but I said, look, I can offer pretty low-cost service and I’m not gonna have any overhead and I wanna really be out on my own. I’ve always wanted to have my own business. And basically started by using Google AdWords and going out there and putting up a website and slowly but surely got clients and If you’re just building brick by brick day by day,

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I remember the last time we did a paid upgrade, we had a feature done for almost a year before we actually shipped it because we knew it’s such a huge feature that will bring in new customers and make it easier for them to understand why they have to pay again. 2.5 years ago, we switched to a subscription-based business model. And this is also switching company development culture that you suddenly have to ship updates or features more often. 00:00:32 - 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 product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Adam Wulf. Hey, everyone. And joined today by Marcus Mueller Sihoffer of Mind Node. 00:00:50 - Speaker 1: Hello, thanks for having me on the podcast and greetings from Vienna Austria. 00:00:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you’re in Vienna, and this is a city that’s known for, let’s say it’s classical music history. Mozart is a certainly a name that springs to mind. Is that something you ever took advantage of? 00:01:05 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, when I was still a student, I really like to go to the opera, of course they had those really cheap standing room tickets back then. I think they still have it, sorry, but nowadays, yeah, I have kids now and well the business, so I hardly ever find time for that, unfortunately. 00:01:22 - Speaker 2: Well, Wulfstaller is about to head off to university, so that’s gonna be lots of room in your life for opera after that, huh? 00:01:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right. I just need to make the 1.5 hour trip downtown to go see it. So that’s my other thorn in my side. 00:01:39 - Speaker 2: Well, before we dive in here, just a quick housekeeping announcement. The Muse team, together with a friend of ours named Arun, have put together a little website. It’s at infinite canvas.tools, and I’d like you all to check it out. The idea here is to kind of give some definition to this category. We talked with Steve of TL Draw a few episodes back about Infinite canvases and I guess we were inspired enough by that. We felt like that a standalone site that helped define the category better would be worthwhile to all of us. And indeed, Marcus, this is an interesting tie in with your history a little bit, which is, I believe you worked on a project of that exact name some years ago. 00:02:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. Back when I was still at university, I did a student project. And later on, it’s also turned into my final thesis, in fact, where I created an app that was called Infinite Canos and it was highly inspired by a comic book or graphical novel by Scott McCloud. Scott did two interesting books about comics. One more general book describing what comics are. And a second book describing how he would reinvent comics for the new digital age. The book was also called Reinventing Comics. And in one of the later chapters, he described the concept of infinite canvas as a tool or method to bring graphic novels to the digital space, in fact. And as part of my studies, I created an app that allowed you to put graphics on an infinite canvas more or less. And then put a navigation area on top of that. So that allowed comic artists to create interactive comics that they could lay out and then present in a that place to to their readers. And unless other kind of student project, this project actually found some comic artists who created their own comics and their own graphic novels of that it was kind of cool. 00:03:39 - Speaker 3: That’s really interesting, so it’s not just an infinite canvas, which I think of as A very general just giant space, but there’s a specific navigation format or navigation structure that was built into it as well. Am I understanding that right? 00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when we considered that at first, what we wanted to do, we had concerns that if you just provided an infinite comes to the readers that they would have problems navigating these cameras. And so we came up with navigation layer on top of that that allowed to predefine a certain path you could take around this canvas. And you have to compare it to a typical comic, which is laid out on a piece of paper, and then if you bring that to the infinite canvas or to a canvas that’s infinite, you can lay out the panels all over the place you would like to do. For example, there were comics that were just side scrollers or comics that took in all different directions. Unfortunately, many of those projects are no longer around because back then I used a chalet for the viewer part and Chalet is more or less separateated and. And later ported it to Adobe Flash and that’s also unfortunately not really available. 00:04:49 - Speake

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Maybe the past generation of programmers were sort of subjected to a really awful version of visual programming, but it would be really sad to let that frustration that other people have felt ruin what visual programming could be in a much better design format or just done in very different ways, done in ways that combine graphics and text. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest Maggie Appleton from Egghead. Hello. Thanks for joining us, Maggie. Now, listeners of the podcast will know that Mark and I are fans of computing history. We think sometimes the technology industry is a little unaware of its own history, and I understand you recently visited a museum on that topic in your area. 00:00:58 - Speaker 1: I did. I got last weekend to go up to Cambridge, which is about an hour away from London, and visited the Computer History Museum of Cambridge, which was mostly a warehouse that some people had put an old N64 in and an old Mac and got to play a bit of Pong and Space Invaders, which is terribly educational, but probably not a comprehensive history of computing. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Now, depending on what generation you grew up with, you know, so now I’m old enough that I go to a computer history museum or sometimes there’s, I don’t know, like the pinball museum in Alameda there in San Francisco or some of these arcade ones, and I remember this stuff when it was new, maybe. Kid, so in that case, it can be as much a sense of nostalgia or a comparison with your sort of adults perspective on something that loomed large as a child. Were there things there you recognized, or was this all like essentially stuff that predated your time? 00:01:52 - Speaker 1: I was definitely of the N64 generation and definitely the, I don’t know which version of the Mac it was, but I have a very clear memory of going into a friend’s house who had the Mac. Windows 95 was maybe what we had had at home. I mean, I was grew up sort of in the naughties, so I’m that generation. 00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Is that what we’re calling it now? I’ve heard the knots. 00:02:10 - Speaker 1: I know. There’s no good word for it. 00:02:15 - Speaker 2: I mean the century, maybe we could go with. So, before we get into our topic, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, Maggie, as well as a little bit about what you do at Egghead. 00:02:26 - Speaker 1: Sure, so, yeah, Egghead is where I currently work and it’s a web development education platform, so we kind of will joke it’s Netflix for developers, it’s mostly video tutorials, teaching anything, mostly on JavaScript, lots of React, Angular view, that sort of thing. And I’m the art director, designer, illustrator there. So essentially I handle most of anything that is visual design, and I also do quite a bit of UX design there. It’s sort of a small company, so you get to be a bit of an all-rounder. And because it’s a very developer focused company, I also develop, mostly working in React. I like to call myself a mediocre developer, so I’m not intense, you know, I don’t really like dig into, you know, the deep code, but I know my way around, you know, front end database. So yeah, that’s kind of me. 00:03:11 - Speaker 2: And it seems like you came maybe from the, I don’t know, illustration or design side, and then that led you to kind of the development side, or was it the other way around? 00:03:20 - Speaker 1: Yes, it was definitely design and illustration first. So I had grown up in a very technological household. My parents were both programmers. I had a lot of access to technology quite young. So I learned, you know, HTML and CSS, but I wasn’t really introduced to proper programming young and you know, there wasn’t any like IT education in school. So I went more into design and illustration in my early twenties and then learned programming, mostly out of employment necessity, you know, I was, I was designing websites and, you know, starting to learn JavaScript a bit and figuring out how to get a model to work. And then, of course, once I started working at Egghead, got a lot more into programming and development. So I very much come at it from, I struggle to learn it. I’m maybe not. I don’t want to get into natural types of people, but of course some people have an affinity for being able to do abstract reasoning and they’re very good programmers because they can hold a ton of cognitive context in their head about what component is connected to our database, you know, where messages are

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: That to me was the magic of the iPad, the direct manipulation of the iPad with my hands. It just felt so human in a way that the computers and even the phone never did. 00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by my two colleagues, Mark McGranaghan. Hey. And Leonard Sversky. Hi. And I’m very excited to say that we have just booked our lodging and flights for our first in-person team summit in a year and a half, is it? The last time was Arizona in early 2020. So we’ve been doing all our summits, which is a very important way that we plan our work and just bond as humans get out of the day to day a little bit. We’ve been doing it all virtually, but that just is not the same. So we’re gonna be meeting soon in France for a nice get together and chance to really think some big thoughts. Look forward to seeing you both and our two other colleagues in person. 00:01:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it should be awesome. 00:01:18 - Speaker 3: I’m kind of proud of us for actually making it all this way basically, but yeah, it feels like we really need and would really benefit from seeing each other again. 00:01:27 - Speaker 2: For a team that scaled a lot, we had the benefit that the four of us already knew each other in many cases very well, because we’ve been working together for years, we already have those human connections. It’s easier to translate that to the virtual space. But I think if you had a team that was adding a lot of people swiftly, yeah, seems like a challenge to scale the culture, to keep the creativity and vision, and all the things that just tend to come from being able to not just see each other as moving squares on your screen, but as real full three dimensional human beings. So our topic today is the future of the iPad. So Muse is, at least at the moment, an iPad only app, so clearly we’ve bet our business on it, and we see big potential in the iPad as a creative tool, not just a consumption device, but something you can use to create, do work, be productive, and of course, for our purposes to think as a rumination space. But we’ve been at this a few years now, it’s interesting to look both at the history of how the iPad has evolved even as we’ve been on it. Then furthermore, at this moment, iPad OS 15 is in beta. It’s got some enhancements to the multitasking capabilities, which is sort of a power user capability, and all that just, I think, had me at least as I was using the beta, reflecting on how has this platform evolved. From our perspective as app developers as users that want to see it be a great creative tool. So I guess the first question that a lot of folks tend to ask. And I think it was last year the iPad had its 10 year anniversary, and there was a lot of articles about what does it mean or where are we at or how has this platform evolved in this time, and I think the tenor there was generally negative. I’ll link a few, but Strateteri, for example, has one called the Tragic iPad, and they basically say it’s a device that never found its purpose or never found its real role. It’s sort of too big to be mobile and fit in your pocket the way a phone does, but it’s not as powerful as a laptop. This thing doesn’t have a clear role in people’s lives, at least that’s the way that was presented then. How do you both see the role and who it’s for question with the iPad. 00:03:35 - Speaker 3: I think the fact that it doesn’t have a clearer role is both the appeal of the iPad for many people that it can be a lot of things and a lot of different things to everyone, but it’s also, especially for us, the developers, it’s also the problem, right? That we don’t really know what Apple has in mind for the iPad, but it wants the iPad to be who it markets the iPad for. And so it’s hard to really think about the future of the iPad and be certain what kind of app you should build for it. 00:04:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to my mind, the verdict is very mixed here. So I think the iPad has succeeded as this unique third form factor that’s somewhat mobile and critically has multi-touch input with a pencil and for apps that are designed for that hardware, things like Procreate and of course Muse, I think it’s uniquely good and it’s really special. The other thing that I think people envisioned for the iPad was this new general purpose computing platform that would basically replace a lot of the things that the Mac desktop has previously done, and I never saw that and I still don’t see it. I think it’s a future we could get to if we all really w

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo are actually not that high, and people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new things, and it seems almost like a cultural love of newness, and people are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in the place where an old thing stood. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest Devon Zugal, hey. And Devin, not too long ago, I would have said, of GitHub, but I believe as of a few months ago, you are now a free agent. How’s life treating you? 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: It’s been great. I left GitHub about 2 months ago, and I also moved to Miami around the same time from San Francisco, and so I’ve been spending my time exploring the city, writing a number of blog posts about it, talking to people in the government and like housing developers and that sort of thing, just because that’s what I do in my free time is learn about cities. So it’s been really fun to explore my new home. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, typically when people think of Miami, the first thing they think of is speaking with members from government agencies to better understand how the infrastructure of the city works. So it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. And can you tell us what your background is, how you came to GitHub, what came before that, and what might come after? 00:01:39 - Speaker 1: For sure. My background is computer science, which is probably not a big surprise. I studied that in school and then I worked as a software engineer at a number of San Francisco startups. And then most recently, I was a product manager at GitHub for the last 2.5+ years. I was leading the communities department where we built tools for open source. Communities. And so it ties in a lot with my interests and love of cities and economics, because they’re both about sort of what can you do to create an ecosystem and a platform where people thrive, but without defining it all in advance? How do you create those building blocks so people can live their lives, find opportunities, build really interesting things that you never would have dreamed of and help give them that platform so that they can put those plans together themselves. 00:02:28 - Speaker 2: It’s pretty easy to see the parallels between communities of different types, which includes open source, and then cities as well, which is you can’t really do a top down thing. I’m sure we’ll get into that a bit here, but unlike, for example, me, my experience in designing products or building software products is often that you sit down, you figure out what you want to make, and you make that thing, and it may or may not work out the way you want it in practice and you need to iterate on it and you need to get. Back, but it’s a very highly controlled experience, whereas something like a community can only be grown. It’s incredibly organic and I think at best you can kind of guide and obviously guidance matters a lot because that’s why we get some communities that thrive and others that don’t, but it’s just nowhere near as prescriptive as what at least I’m used to in product design. 00:03:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I moved over to product management from software because I really enjoy what I call social technology. I think that that’s really a sweet spot for me where it’s thinking about the system in terms of how can you shape and encourage behavior that’s healthy, but also without mandating it, like, sort of more of a carrot than a stick perhaps, I’m not sure if even that’s like the right metaphor, but I think that cities are a really interesting lens to look at certain types of software because things like social networks, which I would consider GitHub a social network on some level, and certainly Twitter’s Facebook’s Instagrams of the world, they really are communities of people where you as the designer or the software engineer or whoever’s building it. Don’t really control what ends up actually on the screen completely, so you have to think about what are the affordances that you provide? What does the design language say about what you’re supposed to do here? Kind of like how restaurants will have a sense of the space. So if you walk into a really quiet classy restaurant with like piano playing in the background. Everything about the space is telling you like, don’t start yelling and like dancing and screaming and whatev

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I do think there’s a distinction between velocity and virality that’s important to make, right? Like a good book can go viral, a podcast can go viral, it just will go viral slowly, be a slow spread, and I think that’s actually kind of a goal is to have potentially like a low velocity, a high virality. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest, Tobias Rose Stockwell. Hey there. And Tobias, Mark and I just recently did an episode on video games and how Mark’s thesis that video games are where technologies kind of emerge first and later they make their way to productivity and enterprise software and that sort of thing, and I feel like our meeting, which was in an online game, a text-based. They called them back then in the 90s was a good example of this. We knew each other virtually before we ever met in person for, I don’t know, a year or more. And nowadays we take for granted that you meet people and even have great friendships, I think in, you know, your Slack channels or online conferences or colleagues you’ve only ever met through video calls, but I feel like that was quite unique for the time. 00:01:22 - Speaker 1: Truly, truly, I remember your characters on the mud, you had to. An amazing automation system in place for your characters, you just, yeah, you crushed that game. 00:01:32 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I totally forgot the mud world because it was all tech space, almost kind of had a Unix style in that sense, you would type commands and you would see these descriptions of what was happening with the action was very scriptable because you could make what were called triggers where you would essentially say, OK, if when you see the word you When you see someone’s name react in this way, when you see this happening, you could cause it to trigger another command. People would do in some cases very sophisticated scripting. I used a thing called Tintin. I think I was pretty simple with it, so I’m glad to hear it seems so impressive, but I think that did probably influence a lot of my thinking on kind of end user programming, personal scripting world of things. 00:02:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was super impressive. Like this guy knows what he’s doing on here. 00:02:15 - Speaker 2: And Tobias, maybe you can tell us a bit about your background, what you’ve been doing kind of in the post mud time and then leading you up to what you’re working on now, which connects to our topic today. 00:02:25 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, guys. I really love what it is you’re working on and I always appreciate your Analytical and pragmatic perspectives on the world, understanding things in a more precise way. You know, we’ve known each other for quite a long time. I feel kind of honored that you have known me through several phases of my life, different chapters of my professional endeavor which have brought me here. But when I was really quite young, I went and lived and worked in Cambodia for ages of about 23 onwards for about 6.5 years. I lived and worked on the ground in Cambodia. Crazy wild story for how I got there, but essentially met a monk when I was traveling through Asia, who was looking for help in rebuilding this irrigation system. It had been destroyed during the Civil War there, got sucked into this project that I thought would take maybe 1 year, I ended up staying there for 6+ years, rebuilding this big reservoir that affected farmers and helped them rebuild after this very, very problematic time. And just was very, very interested in what I could do to most, help people figure out how to improve their own lives, and ended up rebuilding this irrigation system, getting interested in scale, interested in the motivations behind helping people help others more effectively. Which ended up, once I finished the project in Cambodia, I ended up coming back to Silicon Valley, where I grew up and started working on various projects to help people connect more effectively to humanitarian causes, and this was between 2009 and 2012, and it brought me to the world of online advocacy and really this is the earliest days of social media at scale, and I was part of this cohort of designers and technologists and Developers and documentarians that were really doing their best to try to motivate people to capture altruistic action from the largest possible audience, right? There was this promise around these tools that was very kind of intoxicating at the time, this kind of inherent goodness that could come from connecting humanity. And there was this thesis, this broader t

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Molly Milky. 00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey there. 00:00:45 - Speaker 2: And how was your spring break, Molly? 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: It’s pretty good, not long enough, but it was a lovely little escape in Berkeley, and I worked on a final project for my producing class, which was a pitch on a feature film on the Whole Earth Catalog, which didn’t go over as well as I had hoped, but I’m still fingers crossed that it’ll become something. 00:01:10 - Speaker 2: And the whole Earth Catalog here being the Stewart brand work from what was the 70s or 80s. 00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Confirmed, yes, it was basically a biopic on him and the era of the whole Earth Catalog, and it was very dramatic. 00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. First of all, I just love biopics. I’m a big fan of like abstract. Act on Netflix or that sort of like kind of maker documentary, but when you throw in like the weird history, I feel like the whole Earth that catalog was sort of, I don’t know, psychedelic culture meets rebel computing or something like that. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: 100% agree, yes. In a very interesting way that I think would translate really well to film, but we’ll see. 00:01:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let me know where I can sign up to screen that I guess. 00:01:53 - Speaker 1: Amazing, yes, you’ll be the first to know. 00:01:55 - Speaker 3: Wasn’t there actually another film about Stewart Brand in general that came out recently? 00:02:00 - Speaker 1: Yep, Stripe is on it. They made a documentary that’s coming out very soon, actually, I think, and it’s as part of the SF Film Festival currently, and it was more of like looking at his whole life and his impact legacy and also the more recent like environmental stuff he’s been doing, which is much more comprehensive and honestly a much better idea. But I started this project my freshman year, so I’m pretty committed at this point. 00:02:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it just shows that there’s a lot of interest in his work. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting, like, the deeper you dig, the more you find, and the more like of a web you discover, especially on Wikipedia, in the best way, so. 00:02:39 - Speaker 2: You seem to enjoy some unearthing the history of weird characters here, your collection of computing history, folks. I’ll link that in the show notes here as well. But before we get on to that, I think the folks would love to hear your background. You’re quite early in your career and yet already have a very impressive CV here. You’ve worked at Figma, you’re now at Notion, and you just finished a thesis at UCLA, so I think we all just want to know. What’s your productivity hack? How can we all be as uh as productive as you so early on? 00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Oh God, that’s not. First of all, my little background blurb. My name is Molly. I’m currently a student at UCLA. I studied digital media, and I’m in my last year. I only have a couple more weeks left, which I’m very excited about. 00:03:26 - Speaker 2: Wow, congratulations. 00:03:27 - Speaker 1: I know, so close, yet so far. 00:03:31 - Speaker 2: The senioritis kicked in already? 00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Oh man, yes, it has been very, very present in my life ever since like September of last year. Every single week is like counting down the days, but we’re getting there. And I’m currently designing a notion, and I will be returning to Sigma at the end of the year. And I come from more of a background in visual design and storytelling, specifically filmmaking, and I got my start leading design at a startup in the Bay Area while I was transferring schools, and through that I found product design specifically, and I found that it was like this very unique fusion of the creative and the analytical at the same time, that just really clicked for me. And ever since then I basically was just exploring kind of different industries and company sizes and problem spaces more broadly, and through that and working at startups and Sigma and most recently notion, I found that creative tools were what I was the most like just completely pulled towards and really wanted to just dig deeper

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I can really empathize with it because even in my own sort of maths degree, I really struggled with terminology and notation. And I think a big problem in kind of maths education generally is that there’s a lot of focus on notation and terminology, and you kind of miss the forest for the trees. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:39 - Speaker 2: Hey, Adam, and our guest Tamir Abdul of Kazul. 00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey guys, how’s it going? 00:00:44 - Speaker 2: And tamer, I understand you’re enjoying London Springs so far. 00:00:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually went outdoors for the first time in, I don’t know, 6 months or something. Yeah, I I’d forgotten just how nice it is to sit on the grass in the sun, just chatting with friends about nothing in particular. Yeah, it was amazing. What an experience. 00:01:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the ability to go out and enjoy, we’ve had sort of triple threat here in my household because we’ve had one, the lockdown, which has been pretty severe, of course, for the last 6 months or so. 2, we had a pretty serious winter. In fact, it was snowing today, and 3, I’ve got a, a young child at home, so all of those things mean that I basically barely leave the house. Happily I do have a dog, so I have to go out for walks on that. If it wasn’t for that, I would never see the outside, I think. Yeah, that’s pretty rough. Well, Tamara, maybe you can tell our audience a little bit about your background, including your podcast and the product you’re working on now. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Awesome. So I’m Taymor. I’m one of the co-founders of a company called Causal. We’re building a spreadsheet just for number crunching. So anything involving numbers, we want causal to be the way to do that. On the side, I have a podcast with my brother where we just catch up once a week and chat about whatever’s on our mind. And my background is mostly in maths, so I studied maths at university, and specialized in statistics and machine learning and that kind of stuff. 00:02:06 - Speaker 2: And what sorts of things do people use your product for? Is this a total replacement for a spreadsheet or just a subset of that? 00:02:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s really just a subset of that. We can sort of think of spreadsheets as something like causal, our products, plus something like Air Table. So Air Table is kind of taking Over all the non-numerical stuff you might do in a spreadsheet. So making lists of things, managing processes, you know, internal tools and that kind of stuff. And we want causal to be used for anything involving numbers. So any time you need to sort of write formulas that do calculations or visualize data, that kind of stuff is really what causal is about. 00:02:42 - Speaker 2: And I certainly think that one of the main uses for spreadsheets for me in my business life, I guess, as well as helping others, is this modeling, often financial modeling, where you’re just trying to understand, cause of course, money is the lifeblood of a business, but how you earn money because that proves you’re providing value to people, as well as just not running out the money in the bank so that your business doesn’t die, and spreadsheets as a what if tool to understand. Both what might happen in the future, but in many cases it’s just the viability of your business model. One example I remember is I had a friend who was starting a retro kind of 1980s arcade, and they really wanted to run the games off of quarters, because that gives that authentic 80s feel, and then I’m saying, well, OK, but if you look at the inflation since the 1980s, a quarter isn’t what it used to be. This is a US dollar quarter, of course. So we actually modeled all that out and plugged in a bunch of what if values and basically figured out that under no reasonable, we’re just taking guesstimates for how many games an hour someone’s gonna play, how long they’re going to spend in the arcade, that sort of thing, but basically nothing we modeled showed that it would be viable to stay in business with all the costs. And eventually did settle on a model which was more like a flat rate, you pay $10 or $12 or something when you come in the front door, which ends up both feeling maybe more fair, more fun for the patrons, but also is actually viable. And I think it’s maybe an example of where having ranges, which we were talking about a little bit earlier, where necessarily know what exactly each patron is going to spend on drinks or quarters they&rsq

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I think happened was that you got people who knew how to bend and to mold computers and software in the same place as people who were very efficient and effective and curious and playful around things like design and getting things done, and had real needs, right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I think is what drove Mac OS to become such a successful platform. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse’s company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Rasmus Anderson. 00:00:45 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. 00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And Rasmus, I understand you’re an amateur gardener. 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that wouldn’t be very far from a lie. I do have a little front yard, tiny tiny one, and a tiny backyard, and it is a constant fight with nature, but, you know, it’s kind of fun. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: And I always find it funny, weeds are not particularly a thing that there’s no like clear definition other than just a plant that you don’t want to be growing there. So one man’s weed is another person’s desired plant, is that about right? 00:01:22 - Speaker 1: I think that’s right, yeah. I mean, I grew up in Sweden and I remember my parents playing this like really smart game on me and my brother, where we would have these, they’re called mscruso, which are kind of pretty, but they’re definitely weed. There’s these beautiful kind of yellow flowers, and they can break through asphalt. They’re like really strong growers. You know, and as a kid, you know, parents would be like, hey, let’s do like an adventure thing, and like you find all these in the yard, and like for each of them, we line them up and count them and we would just like, Wow, this is cool. And we would go and pick them and light them up. And our parents would be like, you know, behind the corner, that would be like, we totally fooled them. So yeah, they’ weeding as a kid without really knowing that I was doing that. 00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Nice one. We lived on a farm just for a little while, while my dad was stationed at a naval station that was kind of in the boonies, you might say, and my mom was a pretty serious gardener growing her own vegetables and fruits, and we had fruit trees and stuff like that. But I certainly remember that some things, the tomato plants grew fast and easy. There was the watermelon plants that we got one summer with me and my brother just ate watermelon and spit the seeds into a nearby garden bed, and then there were some others that were endless frustration for my mom trying to coax out of the ground. So yeah, I think my strategy if I’m ever in the position of being a yard owner, will be to just identify all of the hardiest plants that grow, even if you don’t want them to, and just say these are what I’m specifically cultivating. 00:02:51 - Speaker 1: I like this strategy. This someone once said this. I’m sure that there are like children books and stuff written around this. I’m not sure, but someone said this and I thought it was kind of interesting that there’s a gardening approach to like steering a system, right? And there’s sort of like more of the plan and design approach to steering a system, meaning that if you have this sort of like organic type of system, like a garden, right? Or maybe software. It’s going to just keep changing, and the gardener’s approach is that by doing something like Adam, what you were saying, you kind of identify the things that you want to cultivate, and you give them a better opportunities. And then you look at things like weed or things that you want to move, and you sort of like give them worse opportunities, right? You sort of steer the system like that and see where it goes, whereas the I don’t know if there’s a better word for it, but the planning and the signing of the system from scratch, you’re like constantly trying to hope that it evolves in the direction you want to, which is, I think, never really the case, right? 00:03:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is I use gardening as a metaphor often for those kinds of organic growth things for something like a community where you just can’t directly direct what’s going to happen, what you can do is encourage and nurture and create opportunities, as you said, for the kinds of things you want to see and and discourage the kinds of things you don’t want to see. But that’s part of the joy maybe is you don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out. If you come at it from a kind of a builder, engineer, architect perspective that I’m g

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The moment when you decide to no longer do your own support. Naively, you think, oh, that’s taking so much time. Primary reason to make that decision is to spend more time on the product as a developer, perhaps. But the side effects is that you lose all these direct touch points with your users to the filtering of features of what’s really important. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins and I’m joined today by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Alex Greekspoor from Agenda. Hello. And Alex, I understand in addition to being a company founder and a product developer, you’re also a musician. 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s a big one. It’s a hobby. Anybody who has run agenda, you know, knows my music if you want to see it later. 00:01:01 - Speaker 2: So yeah, there’s a little video on the home page there, and if you hit play, you get some music in the background, and I think you were telling me that folks ask you, oh, where did you get that music from? And the answer is, you made it yourself, right? 00:01:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah. I had 2 or 3 requests where I could find it on iTunes, and my wife is always saying that you should put it there. But not, you know, those are the Easter eggs. 00:01:24 - Speaker 2: Well, this is part of the fun of being an indie developer, a small team, as you get to wear a lot of hats or do a lot of making of different kinds. 00:01:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and spend a lot of time on things that the boss wouldn’t have found justifiable, I think, precisely so. 00:01:38 - Speaker 3: It’s funny, I’ve had the opposite experience. We have some piano music on the video on our homepage, and people ask me if they know I play the piano. Mark, is that you playing the piano? No, I regret to inform you I don’t play that well. 00:01:51 - Speaker 1: Well, you know, it’s time to replace it. 00:01:54 - Speaker 2: But notably, yeah, the music in the muse trailer there, launch trailer is one of your favorite pieces. It’s one you’ve played, that’s why we chose it. It’s just performed by, let’s say, a professional, yeah, exactly, yeah. Well, Alex, I was really interested to talk to you because you work on this great app called Agenda, which you describe as date focused note taking, and some of the philosophies behind that I think are quite interesting, as well as being a beautifully designed app and has won Apple Design Awards and all that sort of thing. But maybe we could start with your background and especially I’m interested in your work on papers and how that kind of led you to agenda. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Sure, sure, yeah. I guess like I’m not a professional musician, I’m also not a professional app developer. I’m actually a biologist of training. And that as a hobby, I started programming and that basically got out of hand and fast forward 10 years and this is what I do now. But yeah, I started developing apps to help me in the lab. We were in a biology wet lab environment, and I always had an interest in working with apps like Photoshop, but never had gotten myself to programming. And then basically, in the early 2000s when Mac OS 10 came out, That’s when actually I started tinkering with the then new Coco stuff and everything around programming that was newly introduced alongside Mac OS 10, and that basically then grew, started making apps for in the lab, sharing those, all free, they were all free. And we shared them on our website and that’s basically how it all got started. And as I progressed, basically, the apps became more complex and You know, the next one and the next one and then ultimately, I wrote an app called Papers, which was kind of an iTunes for scientific research articles, PDFs, and that really kind of took off and allowed me to go full time in the developer basically. 00:03:50 - Speaker 2: Nice, and Mark and I have worked a bit with scientific computing tools and kind of creating tools for scientists who are working in the lab. And one thing that struck me there, particularly in the maybe in this modern era of, I don’t know what you call it, data science or whatever, but yeah, for biologists specifically, but I think the sciences in general, having some programming skills seems to be a superpower like whether it’s R or Jupiter notebooks or some of these more consumer-ish tools that are still programmingAT lab data, that kind of thing. You started there with kind of automation type things because app development or Mac program development. I feel like that’s a level up from what I think was the usual, a scientist that wants to cru

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: As software developers, maybe we go towards building a GUI with specialized inputs and forms and controls too soon, because it’s so much easier to explain to the computer what the user means if they use a specialized input tool like a button check box and so on. But if that weren’t the case, if it’s easier for the computer to understand what you mean as you’re typing in your note, then suddenly text input is the primary thing. 00:00:32 - 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 product, it’s about the small team, the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by Jeffrey Litt. Hey. And Max Schoening, great to be here. Now, the two of you are working together with some others on an ink and Switch project we’re gonna talk about today, but first, I understand that there’s some cooking adventures going on in the lit household. 00:01:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I’ve been trying to make my own stock lately. I’ve been reading this incredible book that someone recommended to me on Twitter called An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler, and it’s all about how to use leftovers and just like random stuff in your fridge to cook both as a way of not wasting, but also just cause it feels good. So I’ve been, you know, throwing random like carrot tops and stuff into a pot, and it feels really fun. That’s my recent cooking adventure. 00:01:29 - Speaker 1: Inspired by, we’ll get into it a little bit later with the project too, but partially by Jeffrey’s cooking. I’ve also started taking cooking maybe a little bit more seriously than before. Like I think one of the things that sort of distinguishes the amateur from someone who’s more seriously involved in something is consistency and my cooking was never all that consistent cause the loop of how frequently you repeat a dish when you’re just cooking sort of for fun is very long, right? So the learning is slow, so I’ve been getting into sous vide cooking. And just eating way more steak slash anything you can sous vide that I would like, but at least the results are getting better. 00:02:11 - Speaker 3: I’m a sous vide fan as well. It’s a major cheat code, I find. Everything is perfect every time. 00:02:17 - Speaker 1: I wish that had been my experience too. 00:02:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, consistency and repetition, yeah, short feedback loops. I was inspired by a book, I think it’s called the Food Lab, where basically the author does some, call it like. Amateur science in the sense of taking common cooking claims, like should you salt meat before cooking it, or is it better if you don’t flip it, or you only flip it once versus twice or something, it would essentially just cook several side by side, varying this one thing. And then do a little informal taste test with his, you know, housemates or whatever, and sort of like try to answer that question, and many times found out that, or at least had the finding, let’s call it, that things that people swore by didn’t really actually make a huge difference in the outcome, but that idea for myself, I think even our Mutual friend and colleague Peter Van Hardenberg introduced a version of that in the Hiroku offices when he would do a little coffee workshop and essentially like brew a cup of coffee with several different approaches, you know, here’s the Chemex, here’s the French press, here’s the, and then you could taste them side by side and have new appreciation for the way these different techniques change the taste of the same source bean. 00:03:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that mindset. I think what I see as the challenge at home cooking is, you know, to bring in some of that idea of getting better and being a little rigorous without making the whole thing too overcomplicated and kind of perfectionist. There’s some aspect of amateurism and just having fun with it, that’s sort of the whole point to begin with. So I think that’s a fun balance to strike. 00:03:57 - Speaker 2: So longtime listeners of Meta Muse will know that we’re shaking up the format a little bit here. This is our first time with two guests. It’s usually me and Mark as co-hosts along with one guest, and this is partially my theory that it’s a little hard for listeners to adapt to two new voices, but in fact, you two are not new to our guests potentially. Max, you are one of our very first guests all the way back in episode 8 when we talked about principal products. And Jeffrey, you joined us for somewhere around episode 34, where we talked about bring your own client. So, anyways, I thought it would be fun, especially because both of you work together on this research project to

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You’re saying come dream with me a little, and if you get too much into the fantasy world, it becomes almost religious, and that’s where you get something like a WeWork happening. But when you can make the argument in a coherent way and are able to earn parts of that argument, then that come dream with me can be extremely compelling and can take outsiders along for the ride with you. 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 McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Mario Gabrieli of the Generalist. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Hey, great to be here. 00:00:51 - Speaker 2: And Mario, I understand that before your life in tech, you were working in a Michelin star restaurant. What was that like? 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: It was fascinating. I should clarify that I was truly the lowest man on the totem pole in the Michelin Star restaurant, so a lot of chopping vegetables and sort of assembling geometric and intricate salads and ceviches and things like that, but it was pretty fascinating to see what a high performance team in that environment looks like, and I don’t think it’s so different than a startup, you know, we had a very Strong sort of charismatic but efficient leader, a really well run team and like extremely high levels of motivation that, you know, I don’t know if I’ve seen even that many startups that have that level of drive from folks that were on their feet 1112, 16 hours a day, and obviously, you know, it’s not the most lucrative industry, so there’s a lot of passion and a lot of art in that that I respected a great deal. 00:01:53 - Speaker 2: I also feel like from what I’ve seen in the restaurant business, you know, chef’s table and other fictional representations that it’s almost has this performance element because of the timing and the real-time nature of it, you know, a startup, things may be fast paced, but ultimately, Maybe you, you know, ship once a day if you’re a very focused, continuous deployment type team, that’s something where you have, OK, it’s show time, you know, from 7 to 10 p.m. or whatever, dinner rush hour, all the food has to come out together and be the right temperature and so on. It feels like, yeah, there’s something almost theatrical to it. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Yes, 100%. It always felt very bad if I did a plate that chef was like, no this can’t go out. You’re like, oh gosh, I forget that we are judging it, you know, minute by minute here. Yeah, that’s an interesting thing to adapt to. 00:02:45 - Speaker 2: Now the Generalist is a publication, if that’s the right way to put it, I think so. 00:02:50 - Speaker 2: That covers business and technology. It’s something I’ve been reading basically since you got started, absolutely fascinating, very long form pieces that dive really deeply on a variety of topics, but often profiling specific companies, and I’ll reference some of my favorites there, but maybe you can tell us what the generalist is for you and yeah, the story that brought you there. 00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Amazing. Yeah, I think you did a great job describing it and have always very much appreciated you being a reader, so I’m grateful for that. The generalist is a what I hope modern media publication. We’ve started out with our deep dives, which are once a week we put out a deep piece of research usually about a company, as you mentioned, could be a crypto project, a venture fund or a trend. And the goal is to tell the story of that company in a way that both surfaces what makes it interesting and unique and the lessons behind it, but does so in a way that it really does feel like a narrative. And that’s both, you know, I think because of my own interests in storytelling and more sort of fictional styles of writing, but also pragmatic, you know, I think we all remember stories much, much better than we do. drier recitations of a subject and so the position of the generalist has always been If you really want to learn about these companies and the way that they’re impacting the future, the most efficient as well as the most enjoyable way is by packaging it in this sort of grander tale. And so the ultimate goal is, you know, build the most thoughtful publication in tech that has the depth of research of equity analysis, but a style that is closer to the New Yorker than a hedge fund. 00:04:42 - Speaker 2: I think when it comes to business analysis pieces, you might think of, for example, a high profile example would be stray, and you know, his analysis is excellent, but it is pretty dry stuff. You ha

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One thing that really stood out to me reading the original research article was that so many pieces of software I try out, they don’t really feel inspired, doesn’t feel like there was like a real driving passion behind like why this had to come into the world. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this podcast isn’t about Muse, the product, it’s about the company and small team behind it. I’m here today with my colleague Adam Wiggins. Hi, Adam. Hey Mark. And a guest on the show today is Lachlan Campbell. Lachlan, welcome. 00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Hey friends, thank you so much for having me. 00:00:42 - Speaker 2: Today’s show is about the journey of views and products generally from a research lab, an early idea, a private beta all the way through to being a commercially available product. And the way Lachlan fits in there is they were one of the very first uh users to try and really get news. So Lachlan, do you want to introduce yourself briefly in terms of your work and what you do with that club? 00:01:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I describe myself as a web designer developer. My primary creative work is uh designing and building websites, and I also am a student at NYU. I just finished my first year majoring in interactive media arts, which is uh making art with technology, so it’s not coming at it from a technical side, but more coming at it from an art side. And I work at a nonprofit called Hack Club, Hackclub.com. We’re a network of high schooler led coding clubs and high school makers around the world. I started a coding club back when I was in high school and then got involved and I’ve been working with the team for 3 years now, making websites and doing marketing and I my official role is head of storytelling. So I do a lot of open source coding and art making slash political advocacy as well as working at Hat Club and going to college. So it’s, it’s many hats. 00:02:05 - Speaker 3: And I’ll also throw in that you’re a pretty, I would say sophisticated iPad user or maybe passionate one, you have some great posts in your notebook about using the iPad for web development or how to install fonts, things like that. And I think that’s even in our first communication when you basically wrote in to um join the waitlist, you did a pretty long multi-paragraph, maybe multi-page thing about all these different apps you’d use on the iPad for research and so on, which is certainly part of what caught my attention and why you were in that first, that first batch. 00:02:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I, I got the original iPad when I was in 3rd grade back in 2010. It just kind of blew my mind downloading an app for the first time. That’s kind of what got me into building software and thinking about computers in the first place, downloading an app on that iPad. I tried to like use my iPad as my primary computer back in 2010 and it did not go very well. But fast forward a few years and then in sixth grade, I started looking into like building iOS apps. And eventually got into web development. Then back in 2017 with the 10.5 inch iPad Pro, I got that and switched to using that for most of my work, most of the day. Over time, then getting the 2018 12.9 inch, I’ve only increased and I use my iPad for the majority of my coding and design work as well as my everyday. I just absolutely love it and it works great for school and I’ve found coding and design setups that work and everything in between. So iPad has been a foundational piece of technology in my life, as well as something I use daily and love. 00:03:45 - Speaker 2: And so to set the stage a little bit, Adam, maybe you can briefly describe the arc of this journey and then we can go into the details and the philosophy behind it. 00:03:51 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is something I’m pretty passionate about because I’ve been through this whole journey quite a number of times in my career because I’ve been doing this work for quite a while. The Muse origin story is a little different because we started in a research lab, but something I’ve seen in all of these examples throughout my career is this process where you start with something very raw and unfinished, and you’re still trying to figure out if it’s even useful, let alone. Uh, making it work in a lot of different cases on a lot of different devices for a lot of different people and then the slow process by which you bring it to a production ready released product. I think the the way we label those points in the in the story is quite interesting and yeah, it’s going to be fun to talk through the, the history of news, particularly right now where we just came out of beta. 0

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We can do the basics that Spotlight can do, but also much better. We invested a lot in the speed to make it faster to launch. We invested in file search to search files in a more predictable way. And then when you have those basics, then there’s the question, what else can you bring to this so you can start navigating and controlling your computer in a new way. 00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Used as a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about amuse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Joined today by Thomas Paulman of Raycast. 00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey there, happy to be here. 00:00:46 - Speaker 2: And Thomas, I understand you have some travel coming up for you and your team. 00:00:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s correct. So yeah, we had Raikas, a fully distributed company, but once a year we get together with the whole team and it’s gonna happen soon. So next week, we’re gonna go all to Greece, having a good time there. And we really enjoyed it. It’s the second time we do it. The first one we did was a huge success. It was especially the moment when the pandemic came a little bit to an end as well. So it was really good for everybody getting there. It just makes a huge difference as a remote company seeing each other in person. 00:01:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s been sort of a secret weapon for us, or maybe not so secret, which is those in-person summits fill quite a lot of what you do get out of being in an office together and gets coupled with getting to go to nice destinations and so forth. 00:01:33 - Speaker 1: It’s also cool because last year we had a few people joining us before they actually worked at Rayos, which was also the perfect onboarding for those kind of people, because, yeah, in a remote company you usually don’t see everybody always in person, but it’s made a huge difference for them. 00:01:50 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little about Raycast. 00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Sure, yeah. So for the ones who don’t know about Rayos, we often describe it as a general productivity tool, mostly targeted towards developers, but also designers and other people who really work on a computer use it. For Mac users, the easiest to describe it is actually A spotlight on steroids. So everybody works on a Mac. No spotlight. The basics are to launch an app, search files, do a few calculations. But with Breakers, we put another level on top of that. So we’re connecting to third party apps like GitHub, Linar, Figma, and have like a public store where people can build extensions for, but other people can experience. So you can think of it a little bit like an app store. So people can build something, share it with others, others can immediately install it. So it makes your work more productive, faster to do. It’s all driven by keyboard shortcuts. It came out of an idea from me and my co-founder. We, like, hugely obsessed with productivity, and we’re a little bit frustrated that nowadays on a computer, oftentimes there’s a lot of friction in the small and little tasks that pile up. And we thought we can do better and basically build it right cause there’s this layer on top of all the other apps that you can use them in a frick. And less way. And so far that seems to be working very well. A lot of people enjoy that. Building extensions with us together. We have a huge community behind us that’s helping us building those experiences. And sometimes they’re ranging also to more fun things like a gift search that you can put in a request, a nice gift, and those kind of things. 00:03:24 - Speaker 2: And we’d love to hear a little about your background, what brought you to this venture. 00:03:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah. So I’m a software engineer and my career started in mobile development. So I worked in iOS and Android. For me, the passion there was I could build something that I can immediately experience. And that basically, since then, I enjoyed doing, like building something that I can experience and share with others. Before Aos, I worked at Facebook on a desktop application, also on the Mac, which was called Spark AR. What I often described as a Photoshop for augmented reality. So for the ones who don’t know it, it looks a little bit like Photoshop. You have a few port in the middle. You can track in 3D objects, and then you can, for example, attach it to your nose and it sticks to your nose with the augmented reality efforts that were there. What was really interesting there, it was also community driven. So it was a tool to create something and then you can share it with others on Instagram and Facebook, and they can use those effects. And this

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One of the luxuries of industrial research is that you’re not bound to the traditional rigor and neutrality required of academic research or just science in general. We’re allowed to have an opinion. We had a number of people who are reviewing the essay comment, what’s what the feelings, take this feeling section out, it’s not defensible, and I felt like it needed to be addressed, because to me, that’s the most important part. 00:00:30 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by our guests today, James Lindenbaum. Hey there. And Shimon Kjeski. Hello, both from Ink and Switch. And James, you and I have been colleagues and friends for a pretty long time now, so I happen to know that similar to Muse team member Yula, you are a huge cocktail nerd. Any experiments in that area these days? 00:01:04 - Speaker 1: Oh, there’s always ongoing experiments. Yeah, I recently decided to move to keging cocktails when you have a bunch of guests coming over. I often will batch up a cocktail. So it’s faster to serve, and you can also be really persnickety about, you know, micro adjustments to amounts and things like that and really dial in the recipe, and I decided to move to kegging the cocktails on low pressure nitrogen, so they could be cold and pre-diluted and ready to drink. It’s basically front loading the work so that I don’t have to do much. I can actually hang out with my guests, but there’s always interesting things you learn when you start changing things around like that. 00:01:40 - Speaker 2: And I do feel like the cocktail preparation is part of the experience of being a host or something like that. I guess if you have a lot of people there and then you’re doing nothing but being heads down in your bar, then that’s not really being a very good host, but there also is something to the, yeah, the prep tool, I guess. 00:01:59 - Speaker 1: Well, as you well know, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I enjoy having the time to really like try to perfect a cocktail, really dial it in. And one of the ones I made recently, I stole from this really awesome bar in San Francisco called Kona Street Market, and there’s this drink called the Banana stand. It’s an Arrested Development reference. 00:02:18 - Speaker 2: It’s the first thing that popped into my mind, always money in the banana stand. 00:02:23 - Speaker 1: And it really blew my mind when I had it, and then I’ve talked to the guys there about it, and then I’ve been just like gradually trying to recreate it on my own and get it dialed in. But I think we’re there, I think we’re close enough to perfection. We’re certainly close enough that you would have made me ship it at this point. 00:02:37 - Speaker 2: It’s a little inside joke there for the listeners, James and I have a long time, let’s call it productive tension, usually productive of, I like to ship stuff, and he likes to make it perfect, and hopefully somewhere in the middle of that is sort of an ideal place to be. And we’d love to hear a little bit about both your backgrounds, maybe Shimon, you can start us out. 00:02:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. So, for the last 2 years or so, I’ve been principal investigator at GSwitch and occasionally doing consulting research projects. Before that, my background is I’ve been running a small R&D studio and we’ve been basically working on unusual interface problems, things like designing and building the Spola acting engine for European Space Agency or some kind of like interface for exploring machine learning for molecular synthesis. And before that, my background was in actually creative coding. I was doing work on museum art pieces, doing for interactive art, data visualization, stuff like that. What I do also, other than work, I make a little bit of experimental music and various computing projects for fun. 00:03:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel that the music experiments that you do and performances sometimes, right? Also bleeds into your, yeah, creative coding, artistic interfaces, a little bit. And I think I personally take a lot of inspiration from the prosumer world of like audio gear and the interfaces there that are sort of designed to create art but also intended to be pragmatic, right? You’re doing a performance or something like that and those knobs. You gotta be able to grip it in the right way or whatever, so I feel like you often bring your music world, electronic music world stuff, and you work in I can switch, and I always enjoy that personally, but I’m also a person with a little bit of an electronic music

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Often when you ask an expert who’s accumulated a large amount of experiential data around a problem area, they’re fabricating an answer. They actually have way more information than they could possibly convert into a verbal symbolic language, and the inability to articulate something doesn’t mean that there isn’t knowledge there, right? Taste is real and experience is real, and you can have a lot of knowledge that can be extremely difficult to articulate. 00:00:31 - 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 McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and joined today by our guest Connor White Sullivan of Rome Research. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on. 00:00:49 - Speaker 2: And Connor, I happen to know you have a dog companion. There’s a husky, right? He is. 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: One thing I like about them is that they’re not bred to be obedient dogs, cause you didn’t want somebody who was an inexperienced sled driver to drive the whole team out onto thin ice. So the dogs sort of take a light suggestion, which is one of the reasons they’re particularly hard for first time owners. 00:01:13 - Speaker 2: I feel like they take light suggestion also is a good training for being a manager of software engineers and designers. 00:01:20 - Speaker 1: Or maybe a parent too, but uh, yes, a parent of a toddler, absolutely. 00:01:23 - Speaker 2: And I think our audience probably knows who you are and knows about Rome cause you’re definitely a notable figure in the tools for thought scene that we consider ourselves part of, but for those that aren’t familiar, maybe you could give us a brief introduction. 00:01:39 - Speaker 1: How would you introduce from? 00:01:42 - Speaker 2: I consider it having created not only the kind of modern phenomenon of tools for thought, which obviously that concept extends well back in time. Indeed, Mark and I did a whole podcast on it, but in terms of popularizing it in kind of the last few years, it’s really, I think, opened the aperture for a lot of tools, including us and others to say there’s more to productivity software than, I don’t know, email and note taking in calendars, and that’s what I think of as the collective kind of tools for thought, scene. And then the, the specifics of the product, I think it really is all about the value of linking thoughts together and bringing things that I think of as being part of obviously the internet, part of things that have been in our knowledge tools in different ways over the years, but putting them together into this kind of notes and Personal memory and personal thinking space in just a new way that really struck a chord with people indeed to the point that I think it’s been widely copied now and I would say you basically invented or at least pioneered a whole new category of software, which is quite a special thing to do in one’s career, I would say. 00:02:46 - Speaker 1: The thing that is interesting to me is that part of my frustration in the last few years is that none of the folks who have supposedly copied us have copied the things that I think are actually important or are even indicative of the direction of like why I built Rome or what we’re aiming for. I think of writing as a tool for thinking. We’ve talked about this in past discussions, just one on one. I don’t have a great extended working memory. Like, I’ve worked with people who are actually geniuses who are able to visualize complex systems in their head, who are able to, you know, recall any piece of information they need, but I have a hard time just Laying out all the steps of the problem and trying to think through all the variables that are there, and just trying to keep my head straight, especially around things like software design, let alone systems design or building a team, or any kind of complex decision. So, Rome, what you see right now as a product is something that did largely evolve as a sort of cognitive prosthetic for me. Largely I handled my ADHD and trying to learn as an autodidact, all of these things that I needed to do to be able to build Rome. I’m self-taught engineer, self-taught designer, self-taught manager, maybe not good at any of these things, but I had to learn how to fundraise, had to learn how to do marketing, like, I studied none of these things, had no formal training in anything, and I had to figure out how to get good enough at a lot of things. At the same time, more or less, or in various sequences. So, I built Rome as a tool for helping me to organize my own learning and also just to, I’ve had very severe A

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Cause there’s more to tapping to other people’s minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But listening to feedback through allowing other people to create in the same space that you create with the right people can definitely feel magical. 00:00:18 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about the product, it’s about music company and a small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and Nicholas Klein of FIMA. Hey there. And Nico, I know you have been working from Europe with a US centric, maybe even a San Francisco-centric team for a few years. How do you find that experience of having the evening be your team time? 00:00:48 - Speaker 1: I think that looking at the upside of I haven’t set an alarm in the last 2 years to get up for work. I think that’s definitely on the plus side of this, but I like to kind of like keep my Friday evenings free, that kind of like gives me a little bit of like time of just spending a normal week evening, I would say. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the uh there was a nice thread recently about some Europe to US times and I think on the Europe side, the trick is, of course, you are giving up a lot of your evenings, but you gotta make some room in there for a social event, be, you know, be able to have dinner with friends or whatever here and there, and yeah, I agree, no alarms slash morning is more free form is a huge benefit. So for me, very well worth the extra cost of maybe needing to be a little more on my game in the evening than I would normally need to be. And let’s hear about your career journey a little bit, so I think you have quite a bit of interesting milestones along the way, including Sketch Runner and artifacts, which we talked about a little bit with Jason Wa recently here on the podcast, and I think it’s how I first discovered your work. Love to hear the steps that brought you along the way here. 00:02:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I studied interaction design in Schwebmund, and it’s a tiny, tiny school in a tiny city in the middle of nowhere in Germany. So I studied interaction design and I think what was very interesting kind of like studying interaction design was that you get taught these like behemoths of tools. So you get taught Flash, you get taught Illustrator, you get taught Photoshop in like classes, and you never really think about kind of like manipulating those tools themselves. And interaction design in general was really interesting because it was just about the relationship of humans to technology and application design, kind of a concrete UI design was one part of this. And I’ve never really thought about kind of like, hey, I’m learning how to design software. And tools are just software that is also being designed somewhere far, far away, but on a hack day in Hamburg where we were working on sketch plug-ins, kind of like started and like I continued to working with the team in kind of like designing and building sketch runner, and there was a plug-in with which you kind of like can still like insert components and apply styles from like a command like spot like UI. 00:03:09 - Speaker 2: I remember using this a little bit back in my sketch days, and it was quite remarkable to me at the time to bring a command line interface to a design tool. I feel like nowadays command palettes are fairly common and power tools, maybe superhuman, and some others. There’s an article from Repole where they describe a little bit the rise of the command palette, and the command lines traditionally uh kind of engineering centric, I don’t know, Unixy particular kind of power user making its way into much more of these tools, but I feel like Sketch Runner was a little ahead of its time insofar as bringing that to a design tool. 00:03:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was fascinating. We’ve seen that like this aspect of I know the name of the command and originally it started with finding a way to make plug-ins more easily kind of like executable. That was the start during the hack day, like, hey, there are so many plug-ins being built for sketch. How can we make them more accessible and faster to kind of like execute? And then it kind of like we realized there are so many features that we can add on to this. And the moment that was like really exciting for me was that I was still studying in Schwabsmund. And I saw someone from the Airbnb design systems team talk about sketch runner kind of like on a meet up and then kind of like also tweeting about this. And I was just like, holy shit, this is really happening right now. And so at that moment I realized that like, hey, there is a potential for changing design tools. They’re also just software that are to be des

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The entrepreneurial drive or in this case the entrepreneurial drive of feeling agitated, there’s like a problem or a thing that just seems wrong or weird or annoys you and you just can’t stop thinking about it and you look for solutions, but none of them really quite seem to fit. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Well, we’re entering a new year here, and for me, the holidays is a time to reflect and think back on what’s learned. And for me, one of the biggest surprises of 2020 was this podcast. We got started on it. It was, I don’t know, just an idea that we wanted to try and then to my surprise, here we are now 21 episodes later with thousands of listeners and something I really enjoy doing with you every two weeks. Do you have any reflections, Mark, on this epic podcast journey so far? 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s been great. I remember when we recorded our first Uh, demo episode, episode zero, if you will. I was using my AirPods in this Airbnb in Arizona, I think, and, uh, it was really fun, and I didn’t, didn’t quite land the first time, but we felt like there was a good spark there. And sure enough, we followed through with it, and over the course of the last 20 or so episodes, we’ve gotten really great reactions from our listeners, and that’s been the most rewarding piece, I think. 00:01:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, in that same spirit of prototyping we might use for product work, we sort of prototyped the idea we had to do a podcast by recording, I don’t know, 20 minutes I think it was, yeah, in the freezing attic of this Airbnb we were staying in in Sedona, just recording into the voice memo apps on our phones, and I kind of just edited together with Ferri, which is this little audio editor for the iPad, and even I think found some stock music and just shoved it in there just to get the feel, and then we listened to it and said, OK, does this. And the audio quality wasn’t good, it wasn’t long enough, it wasn’t, you know, we were still finding our groove, but as you said, is there a spark here? Is there something worth investing in? And we felt like there was and that kind of caused us to roll forward with figuring out how to do the real thing. So I figured that since we’ve been at it for a little while, as well as the palate cleanser of the new year, I thought it’d be good to do something we wanted to do for a while, which is a listener questions episode. So happily we ask for kind of input feedback from folks at the end of every episode, and we got plenty of those over the last 9 months we’ve been doing this or whatever, sometimes by private email, sometimes from former colleagues or friends, very often from folks we don’t know at all, sometimes. Twitter, etc. And then I recently just posted a thread on Twitter asking for folks to contribute questions. Lots of great stuff there. Thanks everyone for sending things in. And, uh, yeah, I just thought we’d spend this episode walking through a few of our favorites. We can’t answer all of it, obviously. And certainly many of these things, I think probably just serve their whole own episode. So you can give us feedback on the feedback episode and tell us which of these you’d like to hear us talk about more. Do you want to uh start us off by reading the first question? 00:03:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so to pull the first listener question out of the mailbag here, we have a question from Gary Zoo, and we have to add a blanket caveat here about the pronunciation of names, apologies in advance. I hope we got that right. So the question is on designing advanced gestures. Says I am working on designing a new writing tool for myself that combines some of the stuff I love about Figma into writing. However, I struggle with designing with the right amount of fidelity. It feels like mockups are not enough to truly express the idea, but I don’t want to go into prototyping too early and lock in the design space. How do you design the interactions from Muse and deal with tensions while prototyping? 00:03:52 - Speaker 1: And one reason we picked this, so we’ve gotten a number of variations on these happily we have a solid following of design-minded people and yeah, the traditional design approach is static mockups, you know, you basically have these storyboards. Here’s a screen that you tap this that flows over to here and then even the prototyping tools, for example, prototyping built into FigGMA, as well as standalone prototyping tools like I used Balsam. For many years and this kind of tap through screens or c

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What are those favorite books or those favorite articles or those favorite passages that resonated with you so much and and took you down a path of thinking that maybe ended up being really important in your work, in your life. 00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use this software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Mark and I’m here today with my colleague Adam. How’s it going, Adam? 00:00:39 - Speaker 1: It’s going pretty good, Mark. Thanks. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: And today’s topic is having better ideas. And this is a pretty broad topic. So I’d like to start with what is that? What what what does that mean to you? 00:00:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the word idea somehow I think is connected with um Maybe sort of a trivial thing, the um the walking down the street, something pops into your head, the shower thought, that sort of thing, you know, if you type idea into Google Image search, you get a bunch of stock photos of people looking thoughtful with some representation of a light bulb over their head. Um, I usually like to use the word ideation when I’m talking about muse specifically, but also more broadly about this, this topic, and I think that having Sort of the process by which you not just have the seed of an idea, which is really more that something popping into your head when you walk down the street, but how you develop the idea, how you take it from just a a a a hunch, let’s say, and turned it into something worthwhile, is actually really important for anyone that does creative or knowledge work. 00:01:46 - Speaker 2: Now, do you have a sort of process or framework for developing ideas over the long term? 00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a big topic hard to even know fully where to start, but I think one of the things for me that’s key is treating ideation as a first class activity, is something important to do, something important to invest time in. Basically thinking about an idea takes a lot of time. Uh, and that the process of turning those well formed ideas into some kind of output is really just the, the like the second half of that. So, to make it more concrete, if you’re um a graphic designer, you probably make uh the output in a tool like Illustrator, Photoshop, uh, or maybe even like, you know, if you’re a physical artist, you’re painting a painting with, uh, with paint and brushes. Similarly, you’re an author, you might be using Scrivenner, Google Docs, and so on. But the moment of sitting down in front of the blank canvas, so to speak, to start, uh, creating the work is really only happens way deep in the process. And so that first half is what we call ideation. I feel like, um, maybe movies give us the wrong idea, specifically around authors because you have this, this image of someone sitting down in front of often a typewriter, if it’s an older movie, maybe more currently you have sitting down in front of a word processor, there’s the blank screen and the blinking cursor, and That’s not the start of the process. The start of the process is the ideation. 00:03:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And for me it’s not just the kind of wall clock time you’re spending on ideation. For me, it also takes a lot of, you know, calendar time. It often takes several days or weeks or even months to fully develop an idea, and you can’t force it just by like sitting down and thinking about it harder. You need the the time, the changes of scenery, the different inputs for that idea to fully develop. Is that is that the same for you? 00:03:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would go with, um, I would of those on one hand. Just expecting it to happen purely as a background process in your head. Um, my long time colleague Ryan Henry likes to uses the word stewing usually. He kind of like likens it to a cooking one of these like, um, slow cooker processes where you, you leave it to stew over maybe many days, and that’s where the flavor really comes out. But on the same time, I don’t think it’s just something that happens naturally, automatically. I think you do need to work at it, you do need to invest in it and choosing for me at least, choosing to say there’s this important problem that I need to think through. I’m going to carve out time and space in my life and my calendar and. My emotional bandwidth to sit down and think hard to concentrate specifically on this problem is also necessary. You get that just doesn’t force a conclusion. I think both, both parts, the focused upfront, uh, sort of the focused concentrated effort and the background stewing, I think are both

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: To us, it’s very important that we design this all holistically. There’s a lot of research, for example, on cryptography schemes that assume key management or on collaboration product designs that assume the server can just read all the data. And in order for this to work with Muse, we need all of the product design, the collaboration technology, the key management, the cryptography, the mental model for how people think about documents that all need to line up. 00:00:31 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and Mark, I like to listen to podcasts in the morning, but I understand that you have a slightly more unusual and in-depth source of audio. 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this morning I was actually listening to the real-time oral arguments in the US Supreme Court on their very important ACA slash Obamacare case. This is obviously a very big case for the US and for many of us personally, and so I was keen to listen in and see what the judges were thinking. And this is notable because I think until recently you couldn’t actually listen to these broadcasts in real time. There wasn’t the C-SPAN equivalent for the US Supreme Court until I think COVID hit and they started doing everything via audio, audio, you know, Zoom or equivalent. And I think at one point actually, they didn’t release the audio to the public until quite a long time after the arguments had concluded. I think they did it every term or something, which is 6 months or something, and then more recently they changed it to be every week, and then now they release it in real time. And of course, that’s interesting as an interested citizen, but also it kind of connects to our topic today of privacy, because one of the ideas that we’ll talk about is how visible or non-visible your work is while it’s in process. 00:01:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, privacy is a huge topic and something on our minds right now because we’re making some product decisions for the sharing and collaboration features that will be forthcoming from use. So in the process of working through this as a team, where do we make trade-offs on things that necessarily results in a kind of a zooming out, you can’t help but to look at the larger context, which is OK, there’s what do we want to do for our product, what matters for our customers, what’s technically feasible, what do we value as a team. Then you zoom out a little bit from there to OK, what’s going on in the technology industry. Obviously this is a very, very big topic for the tech industry right now, and then you can zoom out even from there and talk about the society-wide impacts and you know, what does privacy even mean? What can we expect, what’s important or not important in terms of our lives as citizens, but also just as technology changes, we may need to adapt to what we can reasonably expect in terms of privacy. Yeah, as you know, I always like to start at the beginning with the definition or something of that nature. So what does the word privacy bring to mind for you, Mark? 00:02:58 - Speaker 1: Hm. Well, I don’t have a super nice prepackaged definition, but what’s coming to mind is a sense of agency over who does and doesn’t have access to your work. And you might exercise that agency by saying only I can read my personal journal, for example, and so that’s private to me. Or it could also mean that we are working on a project together and so I want you and me, Adam, to be able to see some work product, but no one else. Or it could be that you want to share it very broadly, and that’s your choice as well. So some sense of controlling who does and doesn’t access your work. 00:03:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I went looking for kind of what is actually the definition here versus my own vague sense of what counts or doesn’t count as privacy, which probably, by the way, has changed over the years, but the canonical one that’s often linked back to is a piece in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 called The Right to Privacy. And they point out that some of these American values of right to life, right to pursue happiness, right to secure property originally maybe meant something more practical, you know, property was your cattle, for example, but now you fast forward here now over 100 years ago, they’re writing and they say, well, wait a minute, we’ve. Started to recognize more of a spiritual nature of man’s feelings, his intellect, and so maybe these rights that we talk about broaden a little bit and the term property may include intangible t

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The purpose of design is really to marry the kind of far out there crazy ideas with what can be practically achieved and serve some practical function. 00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name’s Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Andy from Andy Works. 00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi guys, thanks for having me. 00:00:34 - Speaker 2: It’s great to have you on. I understand that uh you’re a woodworker. I was just looking at your clock project. 00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, when I moved to Seattle, I finally had the space after moving from New York to open up a small woodworking shop here. 00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And how would you compare doing things with your hands where once you make a cut, you cannot take it back to the digital virtual space that is your day job, let’s say. 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it definitely requires a greater degree of thoughtfulness, I’d say, and the material is certainly a lot more expensive when you screw it up. But it’s been, you know, woodworking, I think has just been a great kind of like new creative field to get lost in and feel like a newbie again as someone who’s been in the design field now for 16 years or so. It’s great to just kind of get back to something and feel lost. 00:01:24 - Speaker 2: And maybe you can tell us just a little bit about your background. 00:01:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I came into design really through filmmaking first, and that was really sort of the first creative expression that I had sort of growing up in a, you know, small fishing village in Alaska and then found my way into design here in Seattle at the University of Washington, studied graphic design, and then started finding my way into this interaction field kind of combining filmmaking and storytelling with design and communication. This was definitely at the early years of product design, wasn’t wasn’t even called UX or product design at the time. And came through some different agencies, worked with Nike for a bit, worked at the big corporation Microsoft for a while on a project called Microsoft Courier, doing some ink and touch. 00:02:13 - Speaker 2: Courier, absolutely. That’s a, perhaps not a commercial success, but a um say a source of inspiration for future notebook computers, right? 00:02:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, we like to say it’s the new duo now, it just took 10 years or so to finally get out there. 00:02:29 - Speaker 2: Unfortunately, in this business, being early is the same as being wrong. Exactly. That’s a quote I often reference. 00:02:37 - Speaker 1: We used to joke at Microsoft that back in the Balmer era that they were either 5 years too early or 5 years too late with all their products. So in this case, maybe it was both. So 10 years off. But I did that for a while and that’s really what got me interested in tool making in the digital world and so left Microsoft and then ended up starting a company called 53 with some people from Microsoft. And that was really about taking that idea of building creative tools forward. And at the time, creativity wasn’t really a market that anyone was really looking at. The iPad had just come out and we started to see a lot of interesting opportunities with this mobile touch space on a larger screen and came up with a product called Paper and Paper was like a digital sketchbook and is still out there and doing well. 00:03:29 - Speaker 2: I suspect a lot of our audience knows paper and I certainly think of it as being one of the first apps that maybe really demonstrated the potential of the iPad, and especially back in those days, you know, there wasn’t an official stylus yet, and it was a much more nascent piece of. And yet if you saw an app like this and you thought, OK, now I can kind of picture what this might be for, how it could be more than just a big phone, not just a weaker computer. Right? 00:03:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s great because that was our intention. I think people forget when the iPad first came out, it was primarily marketed as a consumption device, you know, as Steve Jobs leaning back on a couch on the stage there. Reading books and watching movies. And, you know, we just always felt like that’s one view, but really technology for us really amplifies what makes us human, and a lot of that is creativity. So we just saw a lot of potential there. So we built paper, we built a stylus called Pencil before the Apple pencil, and really tried to kind of build out this ecosystem of creative tools. So we did that for a while and then ended up joining up with We Transfer and I worked there for a couple years

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I cannot overemphasize the first run experience, that’s when you have the most energy and the most enthusiasm and momentum coming from the user. 00:00:14 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with my colleague Julia Rogats. 00:00:28 - Speaker 3: Hi, Adam, nice to be back. 00:00:30 - Speaker 2: And a guest, Jane Portman of User List. 00:00:33 - Speaker 1: Hi, Adam. Hi Julia. 00:00:34 - Speaker 2: And Jane, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re working on at user list. 00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Well, thanks for having me today. My pleasure to share a little story. User list is a tool for sending activation on boarding, life cycle, email and other kinds of messages to Sassy. Users, so we work specifically with SASS founders and provide great tools for them to run their SAS companies. And uh user onboarding that we have as a topic today is so hard for us because that’s like the primary application for our tools. So we’re sort of on a mission to try and help founders establish their better onboarding practices. 00:01:13 - Speaker 2: And just because I always like to unpack abbreviation, SAS stands for software as a service, so this typically would be web applications, often ones that are sold to businesses rather than either consumer applications or mobile apps or iOS apps such as Ms. Yes, that’s correct. What was your journey? What brought you to be passionate about this area or be working on this particular company? 00:01:38 - Speaker 1: So if we go back in time a little bit, this is my 2nd SAS product and I’m running this one together with my amazing technical co-founder, Benedict Die. He’s a real engineering wizard, like I would never pursue this conflict of a product without him. When I was doing my first product, which was a little productivity app that didn’t go anywhere because it was not as crucial to the business, it didn’t like have a major mission, it didn’t have a good audience, and also while I was running it, there was no great tool that I could use for life cycle messaging, for user onboarding, etc. except for Intercom. Which back then wasn’t even pretty, to be honest, so it was super expensive, not very attractive, and it was not targeting small founders like myself. So a couple years later, It was pretty obvious what to build because I was very sure that Sa founders need help in that area and I recruited two more people, Benedict and we had a marketing co-founder, Claire Suentrop. She later on decided to stay as an advisor. She works on a popular marketing project, Forget the Funnel and Elevate these days. So that’s the story of fuselist and before that, I’m a UIUX consultant by trade. For the last 8 years, I’ve been working online with international clients and running my personal brand, UI Breakfast, and I also do UI Breakfast podcast, which is a nice design show. So that’s been out for a while as well. 00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And notably, we’ll have a crossover episode there. Mark, Mark’s going on with you at some point. 00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m so excited to have him soon. So that show is sort of catering to my design interest and user list is something that we’re all passionate about is helping fellow founders pursuing that like bootstrapper dreams, slow and steady, kind of not funded, but self-funded growth. 00:03:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, having the pain yourself, that is having previously done a business and see where this is needed, that’s certainly one of the best ways to drive you to create a great product, I think. And you already kind of teed up our topic here, which is on boarding. You actually suggested this one, but it ended up being serendipitously apropos because Yuli was actually deep in the project at the time. We’ve, we’ve since released it, but deep in the project of redoing our onboarding, which we’ve done several times and is a challenge for various reasons we’ll get into later on. But before we do that, let’s start with the fundamentals. Can you tell us what is on boarding and why does it matter? 00:04:11 - Speaker 1: Well, firsthand congrats on your recent launch. That’s a big one. Also very exciting. Well, going back to user onboarding, that’s the process that software people use to receiving value from their product. And this can mean different things in people’s heads because we often associate this with like tool tips or guided tours, so very like specific interventions, but it should. be perceived as a more abstract thing, sort of a larger situation in lif

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So we think a lot about how do you give agency back to people, but we think about if this is your web browser, this is your operating system, this is your home on the internet, how do you feel agency over Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. 00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Muse is a tool for thought on the iPad. This isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and a guest, Josh Miller. Hello. Thanks for being with us here today, Josh. You’re an accomplished entrepreneur and also have a background in both the startup world with Branch, which I think later became part of Facebook, but also you’ve done a stint in government with the White House, if I’m not mistaken, and nowadays you’re working Obama White House just want to clarify that. 00:00:51 - Speaker 2: Fair enough. And now you’re working on the browser company, which is super interesting. Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing there? 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Sher, thank you so much for having me. Honestly, I feel like I’m at Whole Foods right now doing my grocery shopping routine, listening to this podcast. So, uh, really awesome to hear that intro live and grateful to be talking to you both. My name is Josh, uh, working on the browser company. As the name might imply, we’re oddly fascinated by web browsers. We feel like we spend a ton of time in web browsers in 2020, too much time, maybe, and as we were looking at the kind of arc of web browser technology, it felt like the interface of the web browser and the jobs it did for you. It was fairly stagnant and honestly was just curious about why and what else it may look like. So there’s a group of about 10 of us, uh, in a room together, well, I guess a metaphorical room together experimenting pretty widely about what a web browser reimagined for 2020 might look like. So figuring it out as we go along and really happy to be here. So thank you for having me. 00:01:54 - Speaker 2: We’ve had a lot of informal chats through Twitter and other kind of conversations, but where maybe I really felt like I got my head around what you were doing was when your colleague Nate Parrott came and did a little workshop for the ink and Switch crew to show us the experiments you’re working on, and that was very. Interesting partially, you know, just to see inside the machine and what you’re doing, but also because it seems to me like you’re really taking what I would call a research approach. I think you are a startup or a venture funded startup. Is that the correct characterization? 00:02:23 - Speaker 1: Yes, that’s a correct characterization. I agree with that statement. 00:02:28 - Speaker 2: But even so, it seems like this approach you’re taking these very throwaway experiments while you figure out what your initial product is going to be as opposed to the maybe the more classic mode that I’m used to, which is you start with an idea that you love, you build that until it’s clear that it’s totally unviable and then you pivot to something else when you’re forced to. That’s a different approach. So when Nate demoed to the switch crew and it was really interesting to see those experiments, but he said something. In particular, that gave me an idea for a topic here, which is, he said, OK, we’re not innovating on the browser engine. Things like JavaScript run times and how the HTML is rendered and all that sort of thing. There’s been incredible technology developed on that in recent years. You’re innovating on the interface, all the stuff that goes around that core engine. Can you expand on that for us a little bit? 00:03:17 - Speaker 1: Sure, of course. First, worth noting. I am one of many people on the team, so I appreciate being the representative, but you know, everything I say, I’m trying my best to speak for everyone else doing the real work back in the office. In terms of innovating on the interface, I think the thing I want to touch on first was your comment about the R&D and experimental approach, because in some ways, that’s the core of our product philosophy. Whether or not it’s correct or not for us or others. I think with our first company, Branch, we’re 20 years old. Didn’t know what we were doing. We still don’t quite know what we’re doing, but we know a little bit more. And in our first company much more focused on let’s whiteboard everything, and then let’s mock up three directions, and let’s narrow it down to the best answer, and that will be the best answer and let’s go build that. And I think from our experience and maybe just our dispositions as creative folks,

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Because oftentimes when we launch startups, we are very keen to tell the world why we’re so different and so unique, but we often forget to tell them why we’re equally good as what what’s already there. 00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our investor Lisa Ankle. Hey, this is quite an impressive use of internet technology, I think, because Lisa, you’re in Singapore. I believe it’s 9 p.m. for you. Mark, you’re in Seattle. It’s 6. a.m. for you, and I’m here in Berlin at 3 p.m. So this is truly a globe spanning call, but it works. Seems to be. So Lisa, welcome to the to the podcast, and can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you. So I’m Swedish person living here in uh in Singapore, have been here for a couple of years, have a background in working for startups, often as an early employee, and for the past 2.5 years I’ve been part of building out a VC firm. Called Antlers. So we actually run startup generator programs where we help individuals find their co-founders and then launch startups and then we invest in the best teams. On the side, privately, I also do a couple of angel investments, um, a few here and there, select ones, and then my background is in, in marketing and product primarily on the growth side. 00:01:29 - Speaker 2: One of the things that caught my attention about Antler, in addition to its, I guess from my point of view, uh, exotic location. Uh, is that it’s taking some of the, I guess, accelerator model pioneered by by combinator and others, and sort of bringing that to, uh, to this new place. But also I think it has just very nice branding marketing presentation. And I feel like that may even be more important for a for an accelerator who’s constantly recruiting companies, you’re a two sided marketplace in a way, right? You’re connecting companies with investors, right? And so being Uh, being something that presents itself in a way that’s interesting, attractive, appealing to both of those parties, uh, seems quite important. 00:02:09 - Speaker 1: It definitely is, and I think it’s, it’s hard because we want to convince entrepreneurs like yourselves that it’s better to to launch a company together with us than to do it, to do it alone and to to kind of convince entrepreneurs, it’s a very hard, I think, persona. To, to crack. So we try to work with kind of repeat entrepreneurs and very experienced founders. Yeah, and then also establish ourselves as a trustworthy investor. So it’s definitely those kind of two sides that you mentioned. 00:02:34 - Speaker 2: Great. Well, I think that the topic we want to do today is authentic marketing, and you sort of suggested this based on uh the couple episodes ago we talked with Max Schoening from GitHub. And I think we were talking more about product things, but that naturally drifted into this, uh, into this field. And um he talked a bit about the being close to product and even what it means to, you know, what is the marketing playbook in 2020. Uh, and in many ways, he felt like authentic marketing is one that that doesn’t have much of a playbook or you’re doing things that are new and special to you or speaking with your voice in a way that makes sense for The audience for your your product. But of course at the same time, while just saying there’s no playbook, obviously marketing is a skill. It is a whole career field. And in fact, I was reminded of a podcast I heard recently with Patrick McKenzie where he basically described his whole career as being built around taking concepts from the marketing world and bringing repackaging them for engineers who typically don’t appreciate the depth of that skill and then repackaging that in a way. That it’s comprehensible and makes sense to them. 00:03:40 - Speaker 1: I think the episode you had with Max was super interesting, especially around the product principles and kind of having them, having them in place, and it reminded me quite a bit of what you also talked about the company values and the importance of, of choosing what not to do because it’s so easy to say with this, this, this and that, and by choosing everything you don’t have any decision making in the company and I think that’s kind of ties into very much around the marketing and Positioning as well because you want to be for everyone and you want to be this wide, you know, very broad and wide thing and you don’t want to exclude anyone, but by doing so,

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Mark McGranaghan: Uh, so I, I imagine something like that from you where you can pick, you know, your favorite black ink, your favorite highlighter, your favorite accent pen, put them in your little toolbox, and you have this small, very curated palette that you can swipe in and out when you’re actively working on a document, and you’re not confronted with like the Photoshop style 200 buttons, most of, most of which you don’t know what they do. 00:00:33 - Adam Wiggins: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use the software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins and I’m here today with my colleague, Mark McGranahan. How are you doing, Mark? 00:00:52 - Mark McGranaghan: Doing all right. You know, it’s uh interesting times over here in Seattle with the virus, but otherwise doing pretty well. 00:00:56 - Adam Wiggins: This is a good moment to be on an all remote team, right? 00:00:59 - Mark McGranaghan: Indeed. 00:01:00 - Adam Wiggins: So the topic we wanted to talk a little bit about today is tool switching. And so this is the idea that if you take your stylus, your Apple pencil, and you touch to the screen, what happens? You know, what color is it inking? Is it erasing? Is it something else? What color is the ink? Is it something else totally different, like a a lasso or a scissor tool? And this is a a deeper topic than it might seem. Uh, because it comes to some values that I think Muse has or that we try to fulfill some principles, perhaps you could say in our design, including things about modelessness and things about sort of on-screen Chrome. But it also touches maybe on our journey from being a prototype in a research lab through to a sort of an MVP of beta and hopefully on our way to a publicly released, uh, commercial product that anyone can use. 00:01:51 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, it it’s been a really challenging problem, much more so than I thought it would be coming in. Uh, one does not simply ink on the iPad, it seems. 00:02:01 - Adam Wiggins: Indeed, yeah. And there’s a whole set of technical challenges that maybe one of these days we can get Julia on here to talk about would be great. Um, but yeah, maybe we can go back to the beginning. Can you, can you frame up the problem for us a little bit? What, what were we trying to accomplish? Uh, why, why not just sort of have a toolbar at the top, you tap on the thing like you would in Photoshop or any procreator or something to pick a tool and then off to the races. 00:02:24 - Mark McGranaghan: Yeah, so as a reminder just mechanically what we’re trying to do here is when you touch the uh Apple Stylist to the screen, do you get ink, do you get Eraser, what type of ink are you seeing, things like that. And the very standard way to do this in iPad apps is you have a persistent toolbar, often at the top of the screen or some other palette, where if you want to erase, you tap the erase icon and if you want to red ink, you tap the red ink icon. If you want to highlight, tap the highlighter and so on. And that’s a sort of mode where that is persistent until you go back to the toolbar and tap it again. Uh, so there are two main problems with the standard approach. One is that you have that toolbar in your face all the time, uh, which is a pretty big deal on the iPad. It’s a relatively small sized device and you want, uh, we want as much space as possible for your content and for your work, and to not always be looking at like Chrome and toolbars and buttons and other stuff that isn’t what you’re actually trying to think about and do deep work on. So that’s kind of the the chromeless goal. Uh, the other thing is modelessness. So a mode is um a property of an interface whereby when you go to do some physical action, The result depends on some hidden state of the app. So in this case, that that mode, that state is like what um inking button you have pressed in your palette toolbar or whatever. And the problem with that is that these toolbars, they tend to be off to the side of the device away from where you’re working, so you have to basically have your attention in two different places. It’s you’re looking and thinking about your, your work, the text that you’re highlighting, for example, but then you got to remember constantly what’s the actual thing that I’m currently working with. Uh, this is subtly different to, for example, if you have a physical highlighter. So you have a physical highlighter and you’re going to highlight like the highlighter is thicker, it’s bright yellow, it’s very obvious what you’re doing because you’re looking at the, your hand and your instrum

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Which by the way, something that’s a little bit unique to digital systems versus classic analog systems, you know, if your wrench is rusty or doesn’t work as well, but it still basically works as a wrench, whereas if you have one bit off in your software, just crashes, you know, you’re out of luck. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. But this podcast isn’t about me as the product, it’s about me as the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam, Mark, you were giving us a very interesting little workshop at a team summit recently about the use of iPads in aviation. 00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so aviation is one of the most interesting and powerful use cases I’ve come across for iPads in the wild. It’s so powerful and important that folks are willing to spend $100 200 dollars, $300 a year for high-end aviation-related iPad software. So there’s something right going on there, no pun intended. And as I’ve been exploring that world, there’s a very interesting contrast and sort of technology share between these super shiny iPads and this new software that’s being updated constantly, and the very old general aviation aircraft you tend to see out there. This is the Cessna from the 60s, which by the way, is basically exactly the same as it was 60 or 70 years ago. And then they’re being flown with these iPads from 1 to 2 years ago, and it’s very interesting to compare and contrast those worlds, and it led into this topic today actually because we were noticing that longevity of the aircraft versus the almost ephemerality of the iPads and the software and how much churn there seems to be in that world. So we want to dig into it on the show. 00:01:51 - Speaker 2: So Cessna, which is kind of a small private plane, is an extremely complex piece of technology and also one that is used in very high stakes situation, i.e. if it fails, you fall out of the sky and die, and it has very complex controls as well, but those are all I guess analog is the right name, but, you know, again, they look the same as they did in the 60s, even new ones built today, and the ones built in the 60s, they continue to, essentially, you need to maintain them, you need to replace parts and upgrade them to comply with newer aviation regulations, but Again, they haven’t changed much in that underlying technology and that’s so wildly different from the world of not just iPad, but software and internet in general where change is at an incredible pace and in fact that’s probably desirable in this what’s the piece of software that’s kind of the commonly used pilot software. 00:02:44 - Speaker 1: For flight is the most common one. 00:02:46 - Speaker 2: So that’s got maps, it’s got weather, it’s got flight routes, it’s got locations of other planes, all of the stuff is being presumably downloaded or even streamed in through APIs. It’s all very real timey and current information, and you want that, in addition to just keeping up with all the new capabilities of the iPad. So you get maybe that separation is nice, you get the benefit of the really fast moving software and internet world that’s on this device that’s strapped to the pilot’s knee, but it’s completely decoupled from the safety reliability oriented core instruments that are built into the plane. 00:03:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, researching this reminded me a lot of navigation in cars. So my experience has always been if you buy or if you see a car that has like built in navigation, it’s always gonna be bad because it was designed 2 to 4 years ago and it wasn’t designed by a software company, but everyone just wants to use their iPhone, right, to navigate and they want to be able to plug it in and have it just their iPhone apps be displayed in the car. That’s a good way of embracing the reality that there is some shear between those two layers in terms of how fast the technology tends to evolve. 00:03:54 - Speaker 2: So then our topic today is software longevity, and I think you can slice this two ways. One is the software itself and how long that lasts or how durable that is, and then you can also cut it the other way, which is, yeah, software is eating the world or is invading everything from, you know, toasters to cars, and how does software’s dynamism impact the longevity of everything else as it creeps its way into the rest of our world. But as always, I like to start at the very beginning. So I guess first I have to ask what it means to you to talk about something being long-lived or having longevity, whether it’s software or a plane or something else. 00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah,

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant. How do you have your creator tools give people the knowledge of how to be able to address such complexity? 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, David Hong of Webflow. 00:00:38 - Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for having me. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: Now something that we talk about quite a bit in the Muse world, maybe we take inspiration from physical workspaces, physical studios, but I understand you are creating your own physical studio screen free these days. 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s one of the pandemic projects, if you will. We’ve been working in our garage and trying to create a more creative space that just really fosters movement and I think the inspiration just came from Back pain, you know, and just sitting in front of your desk all the time and just being on Zoom, which is a lot of my day these days. And I was watching Brett Victor seeing faces again and just really got a lot of inspiration of like How do you leverage like physical spaces to create stuff? So my girlfriend’s an interior designer and I used to do a lot of art. I went to school for art, which ties a lot into a lot of the work I’m interested in these days and really just wanted to create a space for us to be like, let’s just work all analog and really Just to feel something, right? Just create something really physical, just to really deviate away from what feels like a 100% digital world right now. 00:01:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, doing things with your hands, the texture of paper or certainly craft materials. I like to go to just art stores, craft stores, and yeah, I like highlighters and I like chunky markers and I like butcher paper, and I like all that sort of thing, and I have less as the digital tools get better and better and in fact. Superior, particularly in their shareability, which is really important on your kind of distributed teams, those things become more of a curiosity maybe or something I keep around, but every once in a while I get them out for a similar reason to that. But yeah, maybe that means I should really just take up like wood block carving or something like that. 00:02:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing that’s interesting about that too is I think in many ways, our tools are processing way faster than we can think about our ideas. And the thing I love about working on paper and those chunky markers like you said, is it gives you time to really kind of flush through the idea and work on it because the problem today is not the level of computation you have access to, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. It’s like you can process and build anything, but it’s just like how do you Hash out the ideas and I’ve really kind of found this return to working on paper recently and that’s whether it’s drawing up a user flow or creating low fidelity wireframes. It’s been really helpful to work in that material that almost intentionally slows down and gives you time to think a little bit deeper. 00:03:24 - Speaker 2: And I’d love to hear a bit about your backstory, days before web flow, and then what you’ve been doing now that you’re there. 00:03:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, right before I joined Webflow, I was the head of product design at a health tech startup called One Medical and was there for about 4 years. I led design and research there. 00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Quick personal note, I was a customer there while I lived in San Francisco. This was kind of A doctor’s office, but reimagined a bit in terms of being more user experience centric. Is that a right way to describe it? 00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s accurate. I hope you had a good experience with it too. 00:03:57 - Speaker 2: I did. I’m missing that there is no such thing in Berlin as far as I know. User experience is not a key feature of doctors I visited here, sad to say. 00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Healthcare experience is something where I think we need more designers and more technology, like thinking about that end user experience. Yeah. So when I was at one medical, one of the first features I started working on was our video visits platform. So it was being able to do a one on one virtual call which You and your doctor, and I built that prototype using Quartz composer and kind of started that from the initial prototype of like how we could even wire the AV and really test these cases. So a lot of what I’ve been interested in is design prototyping in

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: And I don’t hold this against Apple or anybody else. There are billions of people on Earth who need great computers, and most of them are not scientists or authors or policymakers, but we believe that this has left a gap where there just simply isn’t a major computing group that’s actually focused on how to use computers in this intelligence amplifying way. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McCrannigan. Hey, Adam, and my frequent collaborator, Peter Van Hardenberg from I and Switch. Hi, it’s good to be here. And Peter, one of the things that I find fascinating to talk to you about is your varied hobbies outside of the world of computing. What’s your latest interest? 00:00:56 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, when I’m not, you know, brewing beer or getting into some strange creative hobby of one form or another, well, I guess I’m always picking up another one. So lately I’ve been doing a lot of hydroponic gardening, and I’m not growing anything of legal dubiousness, but with the pandemic, first I was focused on trying to basically have some green space in my home, because I was living in San Francisco and we didn’t have a yard. And then more recently, I have moved back to my ancestral homeland of Canada, and it gets real dark and cold here in the winter, and I wanted to make sure I could secure a steady supply of Mexican ingredients, particularly herbs and chili peppers and things that you just can’t find. Sort of north of the wall in the offseason. So that’s been a lot of fun. I’ve been learning a ton about electrical conductivity and how to take pH measurements and having a lot of fun with automating all the components of this system over time. So these are going to be the most expensive cherry tomatoes in the world by the time I’m done, but it’s just a blast learning about all this stuff and, you know, what kind of absorption wavelengths are better for different kinds of plants and so on and so forth. 00:02:09 - Speaker 2: And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the term hydroponics typically refers to growing plants without soil or with minimal soil. That’s right, I assume here you also have the artificial light element as well with the northernly climate. 00:02:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and basically what I have is sort of, if you imagine like a 2 m by 2 m bed or maybe a 1.5 garden bed, that’s sort of cut into 3 pieces and then stacked into a bookshelf. And then nutrient and oxygen-rich water circulates sort of around these U-shaped trays and then cascades back down to a reservoir in the bottom, where it gets pumped back up to the top in a loop. And so I routinely come in and I have to top up the water, there’s a lot of water loss due to transpiration, which is where basically the water goes out to the leaves and then evaporates, and then you have to sort of monitor how much water there is, but also regularly top up the nutrients to make sure that all of the vital macro and micro nutrients that the plants need to live are present in the solution. It’s a fun little chemistry project. 00:03:10 - Speaker 2: And I would be disappointed if there wasn’t, I don’t know, a raspberry pie or something connected in this mix somewhere. 00:03:17 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there are 2 computers now involved. There’s one that doses out the nutrients using peristaltic pumps. And there’s a separate one that came with the unit, which handles notifying me when the water levels are too low, there’s a little ultrasonic sensor that can tell when the reservoir tank gets low on water, and also handles scheduling the lights off and on during the day. I’m still hopeful about automating the nutrient sensors, but it turns out that monitoring pH over time is actually a surprisingly difficult problem, and that a good hardware solution actually involves a fair amount of like upkeep and maintenance and expense just in sensor probes alone. So so far I haven’t quite taken the plunge there, but I think it’s just a matter of time. We’ll get there, don’t worry. The end state, of course, is to build a robot arm that will like use computer vision to spot when a cherry tomato is ripe, and then pluck it for me and place it on a conveyor belt. But uh, you know, I think we’re still a few years out from that, both in terms of like technological feasibility, but also just in terms of like, I got a lot of other projects on the go these days. 00:04:23 - Speaker 2: And surely plucking the ripe literal fruits of your labor is the funnest part of the

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think designing is just the process of picking the best option that you have gone through, but you need to go through that process. The more time that that process takes and the more expensive that process is, the less you experiment and you just fall back and you default to what we know. But that’s not where great ideas often come from. 00:00:24 - 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 McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And today we’re joined by Dan Lacivita of Play. Hey guys. And Dan, in addition to your duties as co-CEO of a startup, I understand you also have a particular management challenge this summer. 00:00:53 - Speaker 1: Yes, I have two boys, 9 and 7. They just got out of school. So we are thinking of outdoor physical labor activities for them over the summer. The last one was actually cleaning the garage floors, my son. was squeegeeing the water out and he’s like, Dad, this is really satisfying. I was like, yeah, you know, you have to do the other side of the garage too, and then it became immediately less satisfying for him. Yeah, so, we’re coming up with a lot of ideas for those activities. 00:01:21 - Speaker 2: For some reason, I’m reminded of a beloved 80s movie on male mentorship, which is the Karate Kid, and the famous doing chores as a way to learn to be a martial artist, so maybe there’s some angle like that. 00:01:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, life lessons through chores. I don’t know if they’ll like that, but that’s the, you need to do this in order to play video games, so that’s the model we’re going with. 00:01:43 - Speaker 2: And tell us about the journey that brought you to play. 00:01:46 - Speaker 1: Yes, so 42 years old, father of two boys, prior to play starting play with my other three co-founders, June, Michael, and Eric. We all worked together at an agency called Firstborn. It’s a design and technology agency. We’re headquartered in New York City. I actually started there in 2004 as a flash developer, for anyone who remembers the good old Flash days. And when I left, I was CEO. June was our chief creative officer, Michael was our founder, Eric was one of our lead engineers. And yeah, we were designing and building websites, mobile products, AR experiences for our clients. We actually sold the business to Dentsu about 10 years ago now and through the process of creating all of those products for our clients, especially mobile products, we’re just always thinking about the tools that we were using, and this is when Sigma was very early days as an agency, we just moved over to Sketch and, you know, my partner June was just always talking about how we’re using the same input devices, you know, for our design tools, but we’re using our phone as a creation device in many other areas and so that kind of kernel of the idea led us to leave Firstborn and then start play. 00:03:02 - Speaker 2: And I feel this is quite a unique angle. I guess there are plenty of places where you use a phone to create content, typing out a quick email or something like that, but something like a design or especially an interactive prototype, you know, we think of that as something where you really got to be at a desk, mouse, keyboard, big screen, and doing that on the phone, which is really optimized to be a consumption device. It’s unusual. How is that borne out so far in your product to date? 00:03:29 - Speaker 1: I thought it was a crazy idea initially too, when June initially talked to me about it, and I was like, how are we gonna create a design tool on a phone with that real estate. And so the interesting and probably there’s many aspects of the entrepreneurial journey that are fun, but I think the early days of just watching the team. Create different UI patterns. We landed on sort of this, I think, unique slider UI that allows you to design on the phone while not having the interface getting in the way of what you’re actually designing. So I think that was a really interesting part of the process in the early days. And I think what’s been more exciting and maybe a little unanticipated is As we started to design a design tool for the phone on the phone, we realized, oh, we have this whole sort of sandbox of things that Apple has created, all of these native controls, native gestures that we can now tap into and then layer our GUI on top of, if you will, and give designers the ability to design with the real things, right? The real materials that engineers will ultimately use to make the product that they’re designing. So, it’s been A fun journey so far, you know, it’

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So I do think it’s a really tough sell for classic native apps into the enterprise. Now there is another market which you might call independent creative professionals, and these buyers value different things and say what they want is powerful tools that are shaped to their needs and workflow that they can deploy on their platform of choice, and that give them a lot of abilities and that are kind of unique to them as a creator. 00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here today with my colleagues Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and Leonard S Saberski. Hello. And I don’t know if you fellows noticed, but we changed the intro a little bit. I did. So this is a bit more aspirational than actual, but exciting news, Muse 2 is coming early next year, that will be in early 2022. I’ll link to our roadmap memo talking about that, and one of the top features there is a MacA. 00:01:07 - Speaker 1: Very exciting, the pieces are coming together. 00:01:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and certainly this has been part of our vision from the beginning, tying together all the devices where creative people do work. Clearly, the iPad, while we think it was sort of like an underserved device and has a lot of potential for creative uses, particularly this thinking work that Muse is all about, but having, I think, pretty well explored that, we also need to fill in these other pieces of the puzzle. And so, desktop is obviously the next step there. And of course, one answer on desktop is you make a web app, either something runs in a browser or something that runs in a, what’s called an electron app, which is basically just kind of a wrapper for a browser or a web technology app. But we’re opting to do something that is what I would call a native app, and I thought that would be a great opportunity to explore the topic of native apps generally and what those even are and and what they mean for users of the software. So maybe we can talk a bit about the technical side of that because it is fundamentally a technical thing, but then the design user experience, you know, what does it mean to design a native app and what’s the benefit to users or how should things look or feel different for them. And I’d also like to speak a little to the business side at the end because we’ve seen a big growth in a lot of interesting productivity tools, both kind of business team, enterprisey stuff, but also personal tools and see how the native app question fits in there. So Mark, you’re the most technical of this group, I think by a fair shot. So maybe you could briefly define for us what is a native app or what’s even the alternative to that and how do they differ. 00:02:48 - Speaker 1: Well, there are a lot of different axes here, but let me give you the classic native app and then the contrast with say the web app. So classically, a native app is something that you download as a binary artifact like a DMG versus a web app where you would go to a URL. It’s implemented in the native language and stack of the platform. So for an Apple products that would be Objective C or Swift. And it integrates closely with the platform features and libraries for things like UI systems access, input and output, and so forth. Contrast with web, it’s going to be implemented in the language of the web, you know, HTML and you might have more or less access to the underlying platform features you might not be able to read it and write the disk, for example. And then I think importantly, traditionally native apps store things locally. On the local disk and web app store things in the cloud. Now, as we’re going to discuss, I’m sure you can mix and match different axis here, but that’s the classic native app as I see it. 00:03:45 - Speaker 2: Right, so I think of the classic native productivity tools would be something like the Microsoft Office Suite. So if you were on a Windows computer in the 90s or early 2000s and you would download or even install it from a CD probably, so you’ve got the, as you said, the binary program, you copy that software onto your computer, you run it there, and then when you want to save something, a XLS. or a doc that goes onto your hard drive somewhere and you can transmit that to someone else, you can email it, put it on a floppy disk or a thumb drive, but everything is very on the local device and the software is there and downloaded and runs right there on your computer. And nowadays, both with things like Google Docs, actually, I think Microsoft has even transitioned to cloud kind of web apps with their stuff as well. That’s something where you’re really connecting

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We both really, really like writing and are good at it, and care a lot about the written quality of the product, and we both also have this product DNA where we’ve built software products before, and we know how that works, and we’re trying to figure out if you put those two things together, what can you make? 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Joined by our guest, Dan Shipper of every. 00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: And Dan, I know you like me are quite a reader, reading anything good these days? 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: I am. I’ve been actually reading a lot. I also just have to say, like, the way that you do that intro, it feels so calming. I feel like I’m in good hands. I wanna like slow down and just bask in it a little bit. Perfect. Yeah, but what am I reading? I just finished this book by John Green, who I love called The Anthropocene Reviewed, and John Green, he typically writes novels. I know him for his novels. He’s written a couple books called like A Fault in Our Stars, another book called Turtles All the Way Down, which have been really impactful for me, and this is the first series of his essays that I’ve read. It’s basically a collection of essays. And the conceit is that in the Anthropocene, which is the era that we’re in right now, which is the era in which humans are affecting the environment. One of the central things that we do is we give reviews to everything. If you go on Google Maps or Yelp or whatever, everything in our world has like a review that boils everything down to between 1 and 5 stars. 00:01:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I always find it funny when you look up something like, I don’t know, the Atlantic Ocean or like an abandoned power plant or something like that, and there’ll be reviews in there, which are often hilarious to read, but yeah. 00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s really funny. He opens it up by saying that he noticed that someone had given a park bench, like a 5 star review, and it’s like, what is that? What is that about? Why do we do that? And so the conceit of it is every essay in it is a review that boils everything down to between 1 and 5 stars of lots of things like sunsets or sycamore trees or bacteria or every single topic at the end of it, he’s like, I give sunsets 5 stars, and then every time he does it, it’s hilarious, but it says something I think really interesting and I just tore through it in like 2 days. It was really good. 00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. I feel like he’s got quite a personality as a podcaster. I think YouTube was even maybe where he got started, kind of classic blogger, but yeah, great observations on the world, but also, yeah, very poignant observations, but also just really funny, really entertaining, and so that makes it, yeah, easy to read. I am at the point in my life actually, where there are many great books that have had a big impact on my life that are kind of a slog. But with being a busy parent and business owner and whatever else, I really appreciate something that’s just easy to read. It’s fun, it’s written in a way that it just flows smoothly and you can both get those great insights and widening of perspective, that is the reason why we consume media, especially things like long form books, but in a way that maybe it’s a little less costly in terms of your own personal activation energy. 00:03:22 - Speaker 1: I totally, totally agree. Like, there’s all those books where you’re like, I should really read this and I should really like it, but I’m just feel like I’m kind of out of gas, like, I don’t have the mental energy to do it, and then there are other books where you just kind of tear through it. I just went through this whole series of books. I basically went through the ouvre of this guy Irv Yum, who’s like a psychiatrist, and he writes, basically what I would term therapy fan fiction. And it’s so good. I read like 5 books in like 3 days and I just could not stop reading it, and I just like finding those things sometimes as a refresher to all the heavy stuff that we end up thinking about and reading day to day. 00:04:00 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. Well, tell me a little bit about your background. You kind of come from maybe a more classic Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur background, but then you had this journey of being early as a kind of substack paid newsletter, and now you’ve got your business every, which is very interesting, kind of modern internet media business, writers co

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One of the characters is a poet that evokes much emotion with his work, and one of his fans asks, how do you do it? How do you come up with these words that are so moving? And he says, well, the key is the poet has to speak the words that are already in the person’s heart. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague, Leonard Sursky. Hi. And Leonard, it’s one of my favorite times of year now that I live in a place with seasons. When the leaves turn orange and red and fall off the trees, kind of have that smell of the, I guess it’s the decaying leaves in the air, little bit of a chill, but it’s not too cold yet, Halloween and pumpkin carving. How are you enjoying your fall so far? 00:00:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it. It’s my favorite season, I think, especially since we both live in a city in Berlin which has a lot of parks and a lot of forest area. It’s just really great to be able to go into a forest and enjoy a long walk in that atmosphere. 00:01:09 - Speaker 1: My dog loves it as well. Basically, the leaves on the ground all over the place, I think, give like plenty of stuff to kind of sniff through, so it makes dog walks more interesting as well. 00:01:19 - Speaker 2: Even for humans, I feel like the smells in the autumn are more exciting than in the summer. 00:01:24 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah. Well, I’ve got exciting news. The Muse team is growing. I’ll link to our jobs page here. We actually have two positions now. Longtime listeners of the podcast might remember we talked about our partnership model all the way back in episode 4. That’s when we were hiring the 5th member of our team who ended up being Adam Wulf. That was a good year and a half ago, I think. And it’s certainly nice, the stability, I think, team dynamic compared to the kind of fast hiring growth startup environment that I was previously used to where you just always have new people coming in, you’re constantly on boarding, group dynamics are constantly changing. We’ve had this really stable group for a while, which is nice in a lot of ways, but also it’s really exciting to think of new perspectives and just fresh faces coming in to to join us. And I guess growing from 5 to 6 or 5 to 7 isn’t such a huge jump, but also it’s a pretty big change for us, I think. 00:02:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a really exciting moment for the company. So we’re hiring for two positions. One is a local first engineer and one is actually a design slash storytelling position, and that’s what we want to talk about today. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. It felt like something really worth digging in on that we landed in this kind of maybe slightly unusual job description. Well, I suppose local first engineer is also unique in its own right, but The designer and storyteller versus other ways we could have titled this role led me to really reflect on like what is storytelling and why do we want to call it this for a marketing role or just a designer or brand designer or something like that, and how does Muse tell its story today? And what do we think of the unique qualities of a person like this that could join our team and That’s kind of the whole deal with this podcast, right, as we take a relatively straightforward thing like a job listing and then go very philosophical. So, maybe we start there. Our topic is storytelling, so, Leonard, for you, what does that word mean? 00:03:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s been an interesting process to figure that out internally for us as well. You and I have been kind of filling that role as the storyteller from MS and doing all the marketing and the design on the marketing side for that. And on one hand, we have had really great success. I think with telling our story, I think that’s kind of what we have to do for Muse, since we are a small company and we don’t have that much budget basically to spend on advertising and stuff like that. So we kind of have to tell our story and share our ideas. And the good thing is for us, for us, we have a lot to say. We have built the product based on research that you’ve done at I can Switch for many years. And so there’s actually a story to tell here and we just need to be able to really tell that story well. 00:04:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of different layers of it telling our story as a team, telling the story of the product, telling the story of how people think and how technology has helped or hindered that over time. There’s many different dimensions here, but I think it’s pretty important,

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Building my own tools, when I type a character in or hit save, I know exactly where the bits are going, and I think that changes the relationship that you have with your software. There’s kind of a power dynamic where if you don’t know what the company that’s providing you some software products is doing with your data, they have the power, whereas if you build your own thing, you understand exactly what’s going on, you’re in control. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company, the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, joined today by Linus Lee. Hello, hello. And Linus, before the call you were showing me on video chat here, you have a fun new gadget in the audience would like to hear about that one. 00:00:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is always good audio podcast materials when you have to show something off visually, but I semi recently got this thing called the Surface Duo, which is an Android phone from Microsoft, but the Android part’s not super interesting. What’s interesting is it folds out like a book. It’s about the size of a passport, and if you imagine. Passport, but it folds out and there’s screens on both sides of the book, and there’s like a stylus you can use on it and it’s meant to be sort of like a multitasking, multi-screen, note taking on the go productivity kind of phone, and the screen there is continuous, it’s using the folding screen technology is there a scene there. 00:01:24 - Speaker 1: There’s a solid theme there, it’s two separate screens, but it’s like if you imagine like a Nintendo DS from way back when, tilted on side. 00:01:33 - Speaker 2: Or yeah, maybe a shrunk down multi-monitor set up. 00:01:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and it’s great for reading, great for like general kind of content consumption, taking notes, things like that, not so. For like watching videos or like Instagram’s really struggles to fit on that screen because it’s basically square. But yeah, I’ve been enjoying using actually, one of the perks of living in New York, where I live is that all the tech stores are just lined up right down 5th Avenue so I can go visit them when I go running. Microsoft came up with a new one, I think just last week or something like that, and I went down yesterday to visit it and they didn’t quite have it on the shelf yet, but maybe soon, maybe I’ll upgrade. 00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Microsoft’s Surface line has continued to impress me. We did a quite a bit of prototyping on one of the Surface tablets from a few years back, and just in general, what they’ve done there, kind of going into hardware and doing such a good job at it, is really quite impressive for, especially such an established, you know, company which are not known for that kind of innovation or moving into brand new markets and doing a good job. 00:02:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, it seems like they sort of see their responsibilities of doing things that are weird. They’re very reluctantly did like a classic laptop form factor. So yeah, I like it. 00:02:42 - Speaker 2: And could you tell the audience a little bit about your background and interests? 00:02:47 - Speaker 1: Yes, so my name is Linus. I say I grew up in Indiana, which is where I spent most of my childhood, before that, I spent the first half of my childhood in Korea, just where my family is from, but I grew up in Indiana, like normal kind of public high school towards the end of that high school experience, I kind of self taught myself how to code JavaScript backbone, react kind of stuff. And then got a little job over the summer at a software startup in the area called Spencer. We did agriculture, precision agricultural software, so basically using some hardware in the field. Indiana is a farming state, so hardware in the field plus some weather data and satellite imagery and other things like that to try to Improve efficiency and ease of producing food for humans or for cattle and and so forth. And so I was there for about that summer and then ended up taking a year off after high school to work there, learning Django and JavaScript and all that good stuff, and that was my first kind of real programming gig. I learned a lot there for about 2 years and then after that, the company itself ended up getting bought, then I had a few extra months to travel and things like that, and then went to UC Berkeley, where I studied computer science for a few years just in California, so went to Silicon Valley, did some other startup stuff, was briefly part of things like relate, which is online IDE. Oh yeah, they’re doing some pretty

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: And I feel like this idea of really changes the abstractions that operating systems should provide because maybe OSs should not just be providing this model of files as a sequence of bytes, but this higher level CRDT like model and how does that impact the entire way how software is developed. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and joined today by Martin Klutman from the University of Cambridge. Hello. And we talked before about Mark’s dabbling in playing the piano. I understand this is a hobby you’re starting to look into as well, Martin. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Oh yes, I’ve been playing the piano, like trying to do it a bit more consistently for the last year and a half or so. My lockdown projects. 00:00:57 - Speaker 2: And do you have a technique for not annoying your neighbors, or is this an electronic piano, or how do you do that? 00:01:03 - Speaker 1: It’s an electric piano, although I don’t think it’s too bad for the neighbors. Lately I’ve been trying to learn a WBC 400 piece that I can play together with my wife, so she’ll play two hands and I’ll play the other two. 00:01:15 - Speaker 2: Nice. I suspect a lot of our listeners know you already, Martin. I think you’re within your small, narrow niche, you’re a pretty high profile guy, but for those that don’t, it’d be great to hear a little bit about your background. What brought you on the journey to the topic we’re gonna talk about today? 00:01:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I’m a computer scientist, I guess. I started out as an entrepreneur and started two startups some years ago. I ended up at LinkedIn through the acquisition of the 2nd startup. And they worked on large scale stream processing with Apache Kafka and was part of that sort of stream processing world for a while. And then I wanted to share what I had learned about building large scale distributed data systems. And so I then took some time out to write a book which is called Designing Data Intensive Applications, which has turned out to be surprisingly popular. 00:02:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you wrote a nice kind of tell-all, you showed the numbers on it, which it’s been financially successful for you, but also one of the more popular O’Reilly books just by kind of copy sold in recent times. I like that post, like the candor there, but yeah, it makes you a pretty successful author, right? 00:02:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s sold over 100,000 copies, which is, wow, way more than what I was expecting for something that it’s a pretty technical, pretty niche book, really. But the goal of the book really is to help people figure out what sort of storage technologies and data processing technologies are appropriate for their particular use case. So it’s a lot about the trade-offs and the pros and cons of different types of systems. And there’s not a whole lot on that sort of thing out there, you know, there’s a lot of sort of vendor talk hyping the capabilities of their particular database or whatever it might be, but not so much on this comparison between different approaches. So that’s what my book tries to provide. Yeah, and then after writing that book, I sort of slipped into academia, sort of half by accident, half by design. So I then found a job at the University of Cambridge where I could do research full time. And since then I’ve been working on what we have come to call the first software, which we’re going to talk about today. The nice thing there is that now then academia compared to the startup world, I have the freedom to work on really long term ideas, big ideas which might take 5 or 10 years until they turn into like viable technologies that might be used in everyday software development. But if they do work, they’ll be really impactful and really important and so I’m enjoying that freedom to work on really long term things now as an academic. 00:03:53 - Speaker 2: And certainly it struck me when we got the chance to work together through these Ink & Switch projects that because you have both the commercial world, including startup founder, but obviously you’re very immersed in the academic kind of machinery now and again just that long-term mindset and thinking about creating public goods and all that sort of thing. And I found that I actually really like now working with people that have both of those. Another great example there would be another former podcast guest Jeffrey Litt. He was also in the startup world, now he’s doing academic work at MIT. 00:04:26 - Speaker

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Also, in your field that you say, OK, I need this programmer with this designer and together with them and the right vision, we can build something. I think it’s very similar with film production. We all work at the end of what’s possible, and we want to go beyond. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Maximilian Becht of Cosmovision. 00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hi Adam. Nice to meet you. 00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And Max, I know you just got back from a pretty intense film shoot. Tell me about that. 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m just back in Berlin. I was shooting for 30 shooting days. That’s like a little bit more days all around it because we had 6 weeks of prep and 6 weeks of shooting and now 2 weeks of. Post production for my production team. I was a production manager, shooting theatrical movie in southern Germany and this was my rough summer and yeah, I’m looking forward to be back in Berlin and have a good conversation with you today. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the intensity of these shooting schedules. I used to live in Los Angeles, and had a lot of friends that were in Hollywood, and I think sometimes it’s nice to have sort of an intense work period, but then maybe a longer break in between, but it often was quite surprising to me. Puts even the intense work schedules of Silicon Valley, gives it a run for its money, you might say. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I think for the last weeks, my workdays had around 12 to 15 hours and the weekends were not really weekends. So it’s like a vacation camp. This filming feels sometimes like this sprint. Maybe you can compare it to the tech industry when you really have this one project, this one program you want to finish and you really give every effort and After it, you feel it drops sometimes in like an emotional hole because you’re way, there’s something missing. I have to be working right now, not, so you were always wondering, oh yeah, what’s happening. 00:02:20 - Speaker 2: Actually I have very strong memories of my first experience of exactly that drop, which was in the video game industry at the beginning of my career. And we were just working these, yeah, basically every waking moment for weeks on an E3 demo, so E3 was the big conference, you gotta have a great demo, and I remember when we finally, well, we shipped it because E3 happened, so there was no more time. After that, I just didn’t know what to do with myself for a day. I couldn’t remember what my life was like when it wasn’t just nonstop working, not a great place to be. But in a way, it had its moments, maybe because I was sort of young and had no other responsibilities in my life. 00:02:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m always reflecting on that part, whether how much energy and, yeah, you put into your work. And with film, it’s always because it’s a passion thing for most of the people I know, that way it’s hard to divide it strictly between your personal life and your professional life because you always do it out of a passion, out of the lust to really create awesome images, awesome films. 00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely a problem we have in the software world as well. So Max, you’re a video producer or a film producer, I don’t know exactly how you title yourself, but tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into this field. 00:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m a film producer. I would specify it more as a creative producer because I like to create a content and develop content together with someone, but also have the production side in my head to know how to finance a product, how to organize the product, and how to really finish it in the end. But the part at the beginning where you develop a story where you imagine ideas, where you Look for a concept that’s the part I like most about filmmaking. I, after my A Levels, I had some years of internships with production companies and working on sets as a runner, set runner, you are on a film set and see that all the infrastructure is working well. You run from the set to the base to get a cable or something or to grab a coffee for some important person. But that way you learn the infrastructure, the how film work, how every department has its purpose on the set. And then I applied for film university in southern Germany at Film Academy, uh, Baden Wittenberg. It’s a very renowned film school and yeah, I studied 5 years of film there. I produced several short films, mid-length films. With different formats like starting with uh fiction

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: On the academic side, you’re very limited by your work has to fit in the box of like a peer reviewed quantifiable research paper and in the commercial world, it needs to be commercializable in the next, you know, probably a year or two, maybe, maybe 3, but all the good ideas don’t fit in one of those two boxes. 00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. We use the software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company, the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan. Mark, you reading anything good lately? 00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, just last night, I actually reread an ultra classic, you and your Research by Hamming, who’s a famous scientist, and it’s about how you build a really impactful research program over the course of your career, and I was inspired to reread it because it’s one of the chapters in the classic book, The Art and Science of Doing Engineering, which is about to be republished by Stripe Press. 00:01:05 - Speaker 2: Stripe Press is really on a tear these days. 00:01:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, highly recommended. 00:01:10 - Speaker 2: And also perhaps relevant to our topic today, and I’m happy to say that our topic today was requested by a listener. So Fetta Sanchez wrote in to ask us, how do you get into the HCI slash interaction slash new gestures research field. So probably we need to start at the top there. Maybe you want to tell us what HCI is. 00:01:32 - Speaker 1: Sure, so HCI stands for human-computer interaction, and this is things like the way humans interface with computers, and also the way they use computers as a tool in their lives, how they get things done, how they learn. To use them, how they accomplish their goals, things like that. 00:01:48 - Speaker 2: And I did a couple of years of a computer science undergraduate degree that I did not finish. And during that time, I really remember everything in the curriculum was algorithms, databases, compilers, maybe some network type of things. And I only learned about HCI as a field a couple of years ago. And to me it was a bit of a revelation because this concept of How the user interacts with the computer and that being a whole field of study. Well, I was very excited about, but stood for me in very stark contrast to the System the algorithms oriented computer science that I sort of knew from my brief time in academia. 00:02:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, likewise, it was pretty new to me, and it’s a whole huge world, you know, there’s conferences and papers and many professors who’ve dedicated their entire careers to it. 00:02:37 - Speaker 2: It was fun for me to dive in and learn about that world a little bit, and you and I were both part of this independent research lab called Inot Switch. Uh, and through that process, we began publishing and then made some connections with folks in this field, and then you and I went to a conference called Kai last year that I think really kind of opened the door for us there. Maybe one thing that would be worth doing is um categorizing here a little bit. There’s Human-computer interaction as a branch of computer science in the academic tradition, that is say mostly done in universities, sort of the the pure sciences. Then there’s corporate R&D which is more associated with for profit businesses, but actually it’s where a lot of the HCI innovations that are maybe the most famous, uh, we think of places like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, maybe today, Microsoft Research. And then there’s a small but growing space of called them independent computer science labs, independent HCI researchers, of which I think we we had some contact with. How would you define the difference between those three categories? 00:03:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, like you said, the academic side is grounded in these research universities, and this is often directed by a professor or graduate students, and there the values are really around evidence, rigor, review, publication and communication, and creating knowledge over time, which is a whole thing we should talk about. And then on the industrial side, it’s often more integrative because you need to consider. Not only the the pure HTI elements, but the business elements and the hardware constraints and the how easy the thing is to learn for the user and practice and things like that. And then on the indie side, this is a smaller domain, but that’s tends to be more experimental, free form. People can bring their own wild ideas to it and just try stuff. So it’s a nice injector of new ideas. 00:04:22 - Speaker 2: One way we can maybe make this concrete is to describe the path from let’s say the lab t

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Infinite canvases are essentially like a different document format. The screen represents a camera that’s floating above a surface, and there are things on that surface, and those things can be anything. You can move them, you can duplicate them or resize them, and that each one of these types of thing on the canvas also has its own rules about how it can be changed. 00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us as a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McCrannigan. Hey, Adam. And our guest today is Steve Ruiz of TL Draw. Hello. And Steve, I understand you’re a little bit ahead of me on the fatherhood journey. You’ve got a 315 year old. What do I have to look forward to in the coming couple of years? 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Oh man, a kid is what, like 1.5? 00:00:58 - Speaker 2: That’s right. 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Eventually they will start drawing, they’ll start playing with words, and they will grow ever more interested in iPads, and also, everything will be an iPad, every computer, every device, everything with the screen will be an iPad. That’s my prediction, yep. 00:01:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, already is the case that trying to keep screen time limited is a challenge. Now, of course, we can also look forward to having built in beta testers for our software. You got a chance to do that yet? 00:01:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, my daughter has probably spent more time with tealra than anyone else, and I’ve learned quite a lot by watching her kind of poke around and try and draw, try and make different things. She really likes arrows, but the touch targets are too small and mobile. That’s one thing that I need to work on. 00:01:46 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of a scene in one of these Steve Jobs biography movies where I believe it’s his daughter comes in and tries out Mac Paint, and they sort of show this maybe hypothetical idea that he was sort of inspired to make software and a computer generally that was easy enough that a young person could be creative with it. 00:02:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, if you have, uh, they’re kind of hard to schedule or bring into the office. I don’t think the agencies do 3 year olds, but toddlers are excellent beta testers. They won’t tell you what’s wrong, but you’ll definitely see it. 00:02:19 - Speaker 2: So you’re working on TLDraw. Tell us about that project and your background that brought you there. 00:02:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Tal Draw it started out as like an open source project, I guess it still is an open source project. It grew out of kind of earlier open source work that I did with a library called Perfect Freehand, which is an algorithm for creating like digital ink, so pressure sensitive or variable width lines, takes a whole bunch of input points, and comes up with a whole bunch of output points that kind of describe a shape that surrounds the input points. So, perfect freehand, I kind of started working on it pretty publicly on Twitter. So posting all these in progress GIFs and talking about the different ways that I was trying to solve this problem of doing pressure sensitive slash variable width lines. You can’t really do that in the browser, like it doesn’t have any primitives for like lines that change their width. So, hence the whole like journey into trying to figure out how to do that kind of programmatically myself. It works, it works super good. I would recommend it if you have anything to do with the browser that needs to have a kind of a cool ink. And it’s being used all over the place. It’s used in Draw.io, it’s used in Excali Draw, it’s used on, I think NextGS Live uses it in their product. It was one of these situations where The status quo for like a pencil tool or a pen tool was like so poor on the internet or on the browser especially. That any improvement sort of would have been well timed and perfect freehand just happens to be an improvement that is pretty good. You should use it. That’s what I say. So, I’d been working on perfect freehand, I’d been doing some integrations with like other diagramming tools like cala Draw and I guess in along the way of making perfect freehand, I built a couple of these. Canvas playgrounds almost, places where I could test this thing out or try out the different algorithms, see where it was going right or wrong. And I’ve done that a couple of times for Perfect Freehand, also for like a kind of an offshoot of this project called Globs. But anyway, I just made enough of these sort of infinite canvas editors that once Perfect Freehand was pretty much done, I star

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: But this totally changes how the data is persisted, and I think that’s important because the only way you get good results on sync systems, especially when you’re talking about offline versus online and partially online, it has to be the one system that you use all the time. You can’t have some second path that’s like the offline cache or offline mode that never works. It needs to be the one true data synchronization persistence layer. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about me as the company and the small team behind it. I’m here today with two of my colleagues, Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:43 - Speaker 3: Hey, Adam. 00:00:44 - Speaker 2: And Adam Wulf. 00:00:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, happy to be here. 00:00:48 - Speaker 2: Now Wulf, you are not at all new to the Muse team, I think you’ve been with us for coming up on 2 years now, but it is your first appearance here on this podcast, a long overdue one I would say. So we’d love to hear a little bit about your background and how you came to the team. 00:01:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks, it’s exciting. Before Muse, I worked for a number of years with Flexits on their calendar app, Fantastical, both on the Mac and the iPhone and iPad. Really enjoyed that. At the same time, I was also working on an iPad app called Luose Leaf, which was an open source just paper inking app, kind of note taking app of sorts, really enjoyed that as well. 00:01:28 - Speaker 2: And I’ll know when we came across your profile, let’s say, and I was astonished to see loose leaf. It felt to me like a sort of the same core vision or a lot of the same ideas as Muse, this kind of like open-ended scratch pad, multimedia inking fluid environment, but I think you started in what, 2013 or something like that, the Apple pencil didn’t even exist, and you were doing it all yourself and, you know, in a way maybe too early and too much for one person to do, but astonishing to me when I saw the similarity, the vision there. 00:02:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks. I think the vision really is extremely similar. I really wanted something that felt physical, where you could just quickly and easily get to a new page of paper and just ink, and the, the app itself got out of your way, and it could just be you and your content, very similar to you sitting at your desk with some pad of paper in front of you. But yeah, it was, I think I started when the iPad 2 was almost released. And so the hardware capabilities at the time were dramatically less, and the engineering problems were exponentially harder as a result of that, and it was definitely too early, but it was a lot of fun at the time. 00:02:42 - Speaker 2: And I think one of the things that came out of that, if I remember correctly, is this open source work you did on ink engines, which is how we came across you. Tell us what you did there. 00:02:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a few different libraries I ended up open sourcing from that work. One was the ink canvas itself, which that was the most difficult piece for me. The only way to get high performance ink on the iPad at the time was through OpenGL, which is a very low level. Usually 3D rendering pipeline. I had no background in that, and so it was extremely difficult to get something up and running with that low level of an architecture. And so, once I had it, I was excited to open source it and hopefully let other people use it without having to go through the same pain and horror that I did to make it work. But then one of the other things that was very useful that came out of loose leaf was a clipping algorithm for Bezier curves, which are just fancy ways to define ink strokes, basically, or fancy ways to describe long curvy, self-intersecting lines. And that work has also been extremely important for Muse as well. We use that same library and that same algorithm to implement our eraser and our selection algorithms. 00:04:05 - Speaker 2: And when you’re not deep in the bowels of inking engines, or as we’ll talk about soon sinking engines, what do you do with your time? 00:04:13 - Speaker 3: Oh, I live up in northwest Houston in Texas with my wife Christie and my daughter Kaylin. And she is in high school now, which is a little terrifying, and learning to drive and we’re starting that whole adventure, so that’s been fun for us. I try and get outside as much as I can. I’ll go backpacking or hiking a little bit. That can be fun, and the Houston summer, it’s rather painful, but the springs and the falls, we have nice weather for outdoors and so. 00:04:42 - Speaker 2: What’s the terrain like in the day trip kind of range for you? Is it deserty? Are there mountainous or at

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The iPad is the perfect device of being able to immerse yourself and just being able to explore versus the Mac is all about getting things done and about speed and efficiency. If we embrace that, we naturally end up with apps that are quite different. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleagues Julia Rogats. 00:00:38 - Speaker 3: Hi, Adam, nice to be back. 00:00:40 - Speaker 2: And Leonard Sursky. Hi. And Yuli, I know you often spend winters traveling in sunnier places, and you recently returned from Panama. How was the experience of working remotely and during sort of travel holiday activities this time around? 00:00:56 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it was fantastic as always. And in this case, on my winter trip, I actually got to indulge even more in the traveling part since I switched, I think about half a year ago to working only 4 days a week. So I had 3 days off at a time. Sometimes I took an extra day here and there, so I had a lot of time to travel around. Discover the country and then yeah, spend a few days a week working on news actually often interweaving this with long distance travel. I’m often stuck in, you know, 6 to 8 hour cross country bus rides and those actually ended up being perfect opportunities to just have a deep focus day and kill a lot of time doing that. 00:01:39 - Speaker 2: We could usually tell when you reconnected to the internet because a whole bunch of commit messages and like pull request, things would kind of stream into the Slack channel simultaneously. 00:01:51 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right. I do have the advantage that a lot of the stuff that I’ve been working on actually I can work on offline, so we were kind of in a phase where We didn’t have to do a lot of design decision discussions. It was more fixing bugs, implementing little features, so I would just make sure that I had at least, you know, 10 of those small things queued up for the trip and then would just work through those while offline, then connect back online and yeah, have a nice new update for everyone that was waiting for it. 00:02:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’m quite impressed by how you’re able to do that. Julia, both combining sort of vacation and work. Like whenever I’ve tried to do that, I both got nothing done and had a bad time, basically. And so I think it’s especially impressive with the launch we are working on. 00:02:36 - Speaker 2: Well, it certainly seems like a skill you’ve developed Julia, which is the ability to be really focused when you need it and then switch out of that and go fully into OK. Now in this interesting place, I want to explore have adventures be fully present in my environment for a day. A few days, whatever it is, and when you have that work block, whether it’s on the bus or just days you set aside sitting in the hotel or whatever. So I think a lot of that is, at least it seems to me like a skill you’ve built up over quite a lot of years because this is just the lifestyle that you want to lead and so you’ve spent the time to create your mental discipline around that. 00:03:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it surely does require some discipline, I would say, but it’s, yeah, it’s something that I’ve cultivated over the years and being able to. Shut out work when it’s not time to work and really enjoy life is something that’s really important to me and then that’s actually where I draw the energy to then be going back to the computer and be productive. 00:03:35 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is the design and implementation of our Mac app, that’s Muse for Mac, and those following our story now we’ve had the Muse 2.0 product has been in beta for a little while. We’re coming up on a launch, and one of the key features, probably the most notable feature for users and customers, is the Mac app. And I thought it would be really great to get both of you on here to talk about this while it’s still fresh in your minds, because I think this really is, while other folks on the team maybe have been deeper on things like the sync engine, for example, you two have been really the mind melded dynamic. The duo that is making the Mac app come to life and I’m more of a user, an avid user of it, but I also get to follow along all your design discussions in the Slack channel. I find it just really fascinating and I hope we can dive into a bunch of those things today. Yeah. And maybe we could start with kind of an overall design approach. So obviously Muse 1. X was an iPad only app and we have a lot of unique concepts in there, this open canvas, the nested boa

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: People are drawn to you for your specific skill set that only you can fill. There’s a U-shaped hole in the universe and you’ve created that gravitational pull that people find you. And I think as far as careers go, the more unique you are, the more unsubstitutable you are, the better compensated you will be and the more you enjoy your job, to be honest. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:37 - Speaker 1: Hey Adam. 00:00:38 - Speaker 2: And joined today by Sean Wang, who goes by Swxs. 00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hey, happy to be here. 00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And Sean, I understand you’re a former competitive tennis player. Tell me about that. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: It was kind of my high school thing. When I was growing up, my mom trained me on table tennis back home, which is recreationally. 00:00:57 - Speaker 2: Maybe she sensed that you might someday have a career in startups and knew that this would be a critical break room activity. 00:01:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, actually it does really help in the old days when we had offices, remember those days. Now we had just had like Wii tennis or VR tennis. No, then, you know, when it came to high school, I upgraded to tennis. I was on my tennis school team, high school team, and then when I served in the military, because every Singaporean has to serve 2 years in the army, I represented my battalion at our tennis championships and we actually won, which is fun. Although I was kind of the bench person, so I didn’t actually play, but I was on the team. So I guess to say we won. 00:01:40 - Speaker 2: And you’re the author of a book on career, you run a community that’s going to tie into our topic today, but I’d love to hear about your full background and in particular the work you do on developer experience with Temporal. 00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Sure, I basically got the bit by the finance bug in college because I saw the Asian financial crisis and then the tech slump and I realized that a lot of people in finance seem to be like masters of the universe. They seem to always know what’s going on. And also they seem to be, at least in the hedge fund world, capable of being independent of the economic cycle. In other words, if you see a recession coming, you can actually position yourself to profit from it. Rather than just be tied to the general cycles of the economy. So I set myself a goal of working at a hedge fund, went to college for that. And then finally, after a long sequence of events, arrived at a hedge fund, and then realized I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the people I worked with and for, and I was OK. I was sort of middling in my analyst rankings, but I wasn’t going to be great. And while I was doing my finance stuff, I learned to code and basically every junior finance person that comes up through the ranks these days becomes a self-taught programmer because you have to. 00:02:53 - Speaker 2: Is that sort of like an Excel kind of automation thing or is there something further than that? 00:03:00 - Speaker 1: Do you get into data science, starts with Excel and then VBA Python. And then for me, because I did option pricing, Haskell, because that was the company I worked at Standard Chartered where there was the house language and I just didn’t have a choice. It was only after I left Standard Charter that I had any idea that Haskell was this sort of revered language of functional programmers. Yeah, and so I decided to kind of go in on that. I also read the writing on the wall in terms of public market investing versus private markets. Like it seemed like companies were staying private for longer and more wealth was being created in the private markets, as opposed to the chumps like me in hedge funds trying to trade public stock, where there was comparatively less growth, obviously not no growth, but less growth. So I did a transition at age 30 from finance to tech, and that was a pretty scary one because just starting over at 0 from, you know, my previous career, I sort of strived for 10+ years to get there, to get where I got and then having to start over and not know anything. It was pretty scary. 00:03:59 - Speaker 2: It also sounds like something that maybe in a way takes more courage because it’s not that you didn’t have a career, you actually did have one. You worked hard, you found yourself that place, it’s probably something that Definitely pay the bills and then some I would imagine. So you know it’s one thing when you’re forced out of a career due to changing economic circumstances or age or some other thin

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: A product launch needs to prepare and calibrate the potential user for how much the world is going to get shaken up by this thing. So Muse 2, it’s still muse, but it’s a major version change, so prepare for a moderate amount of novelty in your life. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here as ever with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And there’s a little bit of excitement in the air here. Uh, those who’ve been following the Muse story know we’ve been in a pretty deep maker cave for a while working on our 2.0 product. And I think we’ve talked a little bit before about the sort of big releases versus incremental, and I think there’s much to be said for both. Incremental has a certain momentum, velocity, you feel more in touch with the people that you’re serving, your users and customers, but of course the big releases are where you can really kind of reinvent the universe and there’s the feeling that anything’s possible, something like that. And of course we’re undertaking something pretty ambitious here, at least for our small team with Basically adding a whole new platform, which is the Mac, in addition to iPad, and then on top of that is this local first syncing technology that we’re trying to take from the research lab and bring it into our product is a pretty big bet here. So we’ve been grinding away at that for a few months, but very happy to say that the Beta is now available to prom members, so we think it’s, we’ve been using it internally for a little while, you and I both have used it quite a bit as our kind of daily driver in our work, and it is nowhere near bug-free or glitch-free or even total feature parity with Muse one, but it all does work, and it’s quite a thing to see, I think, but I’m really excited to share it with everyone and see the reaction. 00:02:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, very exciting times for me, actually, the multi-device and local first sync capability was perhaps the thing I was most excited about with the original Muse vision, and it’s taken a few years to get up to that point, so I’m really excited to be releasing this capability into beta. 00:02:20 - Speaker 2: And I’ll link the memo in the show notes for those that are interested, we do a little bit of a, a walkthrough, particularly on the Mac side, but also take a little look at the sync side of things, although that will certainly bear much more explanation in the future. But with that be kind of out the door and baking, as we sometimes say, so folks will be trying it out and sending us bug reports and feedback of all kinds, and while we let that sit for a while, we can start to think forward to the product launch, the Muse 2.0 release. Which is very exciting for me. I get excitement from shipping things in general, even something like a beta, but doing a full product launch is quite its own wild ride, I think, and we haven’t done one for a year and a half since Ms 1.0 came out, so I’m kind of looking forward to that, and indeed, that will be our topic today, which is launching products. 00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Nice. And now Adam, I’m gonna turn the tables on you. You usually ask me to define these nouns that we talk about, so I’m gonna ask you what does a product launch mean? 00:03:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I see now being the other see why that’s difficult, because it seems like everyone knows, right? And you go to kind of actually define it and realize you don’t have a real good crisp definition. And I probably like you, have been involved in product releases of many different kinds over the course of my career, and I think it was really only the Muse 1.0 launch where I really sat down to try to more deeply understand what is the anatomy of a product launch and what even is it, because if you’re sort of iteratively releasing improvements and features all the time, what is it that makes kind of a launch? And I think one of the descriptions that I saw someplace is the idea that you’re creating a moment. You’re creating kind of a feeling of an event, and you can think, of course, of the really dramatic examples like Apple, right, they do these just completely huge events, you know, back when they were in person, but even now with the kind of virtual stuff, hugely produced, all these, you know, press are lined up, you know, all the product review people had their stuff ready to go, and so it’s this big event, big moment. But I think you can equally as well do that on a much smaller scale, right? Even if you’re just like, for example, making a littl

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I look for when I’m hiring designers or what’s the experience of encountering a stranger on the internet. I like this phrase proof of curiosity. Is this person curious about the world, but curious in a way where they take action on that curiosity, and that can manifest itself in lots of ways. One way is, you tweet about it, right? Like you learn something, you tweet about it. 00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by Brian Lovin. Hello. Brian, you are a designer at GitHub, a prolific podcaster with design details, but before we talk about all that, I know you made a move recently and you’re getting to design a new home office space. What are some of your goals in building out that workspace? 00:01:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, where we’re moving from, my girlfriend and I, we both work from home and we were in separate rooms, and it always felt pretty isolating. Where, you know, you’re working for most of the day, so you’re in separate rooms most of the day, but also those rooms were the bedroom and the living room, so the office and living space and sleeping space always felt intermingled. So, with our new home office, it’s actually a bigger room where we decided to put both of our desks, which is great cause we see each other throughout the day. The problem is You have video calls and you’re always interrupting each other, so we’re swapping in and out. So one of the big goals that I have for the space is there’s like this tiny little closet off the edge of the office space, and we want to convert that into like a little phone booth, you know, soundproof it, put a little monitor in there so you can just carry your laptop in, plug in and go. So I’d say that’s the biggest goal, but honestly, we haven’t even started cause I don’t know about you both, but post move, you get unpacked and you’re motivated to fix stuff, and then as soon as you’re settled in, you’re like, yeah, it is what it is. You just got to live with it for a while, you know. 00:02:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a dangerous valley in there where you have unpacked enough to live, but you’re not fully unpacked and settled, and sure enough people have boxes for months and years, if they’re not careful. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Which is also a useful little rule, you know, it’s like whatever is in the box for more than a month, you probably can just get rid of. So just take that box away, don’t even open it. 00:02:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I call this moves as copying garbage collectors, you know, and copy everything once and some stuff goes. 00:02:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I first started seriously doing work from home, remote work, and lots of video calls and so forth, I didn’t move, but I realized how important it was to have a separate space. I think I had a desk kind of shoved off the corner of my living room, which was fine when I had an office, but once I was working from home, there wasn’t enough separation for me between those spaces. But actually the insight that someone gave me was I had sort of a very small room and a big beautiful one with big windows and you naturally think of the big room as well, that’s the master bedroom, but actually you don’t spend that much time in there. And eventually I converted the biggest room in the house with the nicest windows and all that into a home office. And that was an absolute game changer. I had a big workbench where I could do kind of stand up and do kind of more physical tasks with the hands and I had a big desk. I had a Pin board on the wall for keeping all my stuff up, could also even think about and now always in my mind is what’s going to be behind me on video calls and what lighting is going to be in there. So for example, my current space, I kind of arranged it so that there’s some nice windows right in front of me, so I’ll get, you know, sunlight on the face and then behind me is not facing, I don’t know, out over the whole house so that when the partner walks by, she like suddenly panics because she realized she’s, you know, on camera in the background on the camera, yeah. 00:04:03 - Speaker 1: I did the exact same thing as you. So when we moved this big office space was staged as the primary bedroom cause it has the big windows, it’s the most beautifully lit. And then there’s this other room which was intended to be the office, which isn’t well lit, it’s a lot smaller. We’re like, you know what, we just sleep in the bedroom.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: When I think of real world analogies to this, like supporting a painter or a ceramicist or like glass making that’s kind of handmade, usually those things are more expensive than the Walmart equivalent. But in software, it’s kind of inverse, where the subscription to Microsoft 365 is going to cost you a lot more than your indie text editor. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark Grannigan. Hey Adam, and joined today by Perjean of Kinopio. Howdy. And Peron as knowledge workers and people who sit in front of computers all day long, I think it’s really important to have something physical, get out, move around, do exercise. What do you like to do for that? 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Well, these days I run, but before COVID, I used to box. We used to go to Gleeson’s boxing gym, which if you ever seen like a cameo or clip of like a boxing gym on TV or movies, you’ve probably seen it. It was a pretty great place to let out steam, but mostly it was a cardio workout where you train and occasionally you’d spar, which was kind of like a very high stress situation, which makes other situations seem less high stress, which is kind of good in its own way. 00:01:21 - Speaker 2: That’s interesting. I remember seeing, maybe it was in the classic surfer documentary that they said one of the reasons surfers are known for being so kind of chill and low key is that when you go up against these incredible primal forces of nature. Than regular human stuff, the volume seems very turned down by comparison. Would you compare the, yeah, I guess, sparring with other humans, even though it’s not like a real fight in the sense that you’re going to get hurt is having some of that quality. 00:01:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I forget who said it. Maybe it was Mike Tyson or something, but there’s this like really famous boxing quote, which is like, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. It’s a life lesson in a way, and I think it applies to a lot more than just boxing. 00:02:02 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I had a colleague who was doing that for a little while, but his wrist got sore enough. Maybe he was doing it wrong or something, but he ended up basically not being able to type for a week. Ouch. Obviously, as a creator, your hands are second only maybe to your eyes and your brain as being key tools. Do you worry about that at all or do you have any sense of like I’m sort of taking my delicate crafting tools? Using them to pummel a bag of sand or another person. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: I think there’s something to be said for making your delicate tools a little more durable, but I think for me, actually, like things like yoga stress my wrist a lot more than boxing did. And I think it’s just like different things might stress out different people in different places. And I think like trying all the different types of physical activity and going with what works for you is, it kind of makes sense to do, even though it’s kind of a slog to figure it out. 00:02:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when it comes to fitness, and I definitely became a huge believer in the importance of doing something physical, both for the change of pace, but also really because it’s so important for maintaining our health earlier in my life as a kind of tech person. And I think one of the things that’s important is just to find something you enjoy. Some people love running, I do. Many people just cannot stand it. Others like lifting weights, others like riding their bike, others like boxing, climbing, but whatever it is, if the activity itself is enjoyable, not just the result of enhancing your strength and flexibility and endurance and general health and well-being, metabolic well-being maybe, then you’re likely to do it. And if you’re likely to do it, then that’s sustainable over the long term. 00:03:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. If you don’t enjoy it, you’re not gonna stick with it, right? 00:03:43 - Speaker 2: And so maybe you could tell us a little about your background. You’ve worked at some pretty interesting companies. 00:03:48 - Speaker 1: Sure, so most recently, before working on Canopio, I was working at Fog Creek, which eventually became Glitch, which is a web development tool similar to Hiroku’s web development tool once upon a time, and I was the co-creator of Glitch and did its original design and the editor and stuff like that. I think nowadays things are very different, so the glitch you see now is very different than the glitch of 3 years ago. 00:04:12 - Speaker 2: When you fir