> The “tools for thought” trend was in full swing, and being described as note-taking or sketching app was in our review mirror.
I'd love to hear the author dig more into this. I've never heard of Muse but the "tools for thought" seems to play into the zero interest rate phenomenon they describe.
Specifically, I don't really need a tool for thought, my brain works perfectly well. Maybe it's a cool toy but what's the problem it's solving? The reviewers seem to hint that maybe Muse was particularly good at note taking and sketching. Those seem like more concrete problems, I'm surprised the team shied away from them. Were they not sexy enough?
Collaborative sketching, even! Maybe for architect design iterations? Not sure, but the author does seem to recognize this problem in a different lens.
> We were too unfocused in our target market, and ended up as an “everything app.”
Of course no raindrop causes the flood but that observation is a highlight for me: it's important to be grounded in a real problem that's being solved.
Thanks for the writeup, your writing certainly has a positive take to an unfortunate end which is very inspirational.
I used Muse a bit early on around their soft launch. I think the “tool for thought” concept transcends just note-taking and sketching. The goal is to be able to collect, record, organize, and relate ideas in ways that let you explore their connections, drill deeper into specific areas, and zoom out to see a big picture. Lots of tools have been trying this in wildly divergent ways over the years: mind maps, outliners, diagramming tools, etc.
In other words, the goal is always far bigger than the basic functions the app is built upon. The problem is that we don’t have a good word for what such an app is trying to do. Calling it a “note taker” would prevent a lot of folks who might actually love it from even trying it. But, maybe that comes back to the lesson of failing to focus on a specific user base.
I made a serious effort to integrate Muse into my work starting around late 2021 or early 2022, and in fact bought an iPad Mini and Apple Pencil specifically to use Muse. The work that comes out of Ink & Switch is always interesting, and I was excited to try some of it out in the real world. Over a year or so, I used it to read and review PDFs (mostly journal articles for work), wrote and presented a lunch-and-learn from Muse, dropped PNG plots from Jupyter for scribbling or easy comparison; I even got one of my colleagues interested enough to use the collaboration features semi-regularly.
It hasn’t stuck though, and I’ve stopped using it; subscription will lapse later this year. I’m sad; like others here I really wanted to like this and for it to make sense to keep using.
I don’t a have clear set of reasons for why it didn’t stick. Just thinking out loud. Partially, I was fighting against my organization — my immediate team is science / Apple / Python, but the larger company is Teams / Windows / PowerPoint, and that’s always friction. Partially, it was a workflow thing — most often I wanted to review PDFs, which live in Zotero, and then it’s like, did I copy that one over yet? Where are my notes about that one? Muse’s PDF excerpting feature is really wonderful; the lack of being able to zoom a PDF, or support for table of contents, was a bummer. Large PDFs like textbooks could be problematic. Partially it was that Muse on iPad vs macOS felt like two incomplete halves — can’t type on iPad, can’t ink on macOS. Partially: things I did in Muse, felt stuck in Muse; not literally true, but copy or export out of Obsidian vs Muse feels very different. Partially: always that nagging concern from lack of E2EE sync, and after Apple launched E2EE for iCloud, Obsidian + iCloud offered the sync I wanted with a subscription I already had anyhow. (Collaboration features aren’t as good, though!)
Anyhow. Muse did so many things well and first in this space, it remains impressive. Many iPad apps (in my opinion) are incrementally different versions of Apple Notes; Muse is a standout example that supports Apple Pencil as well as Apple first-party apps but targets a very substantially different use than drawing. Although I’m setting it aside, still optimistic about what this year will bring for Muse, and wishing the best to Adam Wulf!
It's a niche market for sure. Apple released Freeform[0] on MacOS (free) which replicates a lot of Muse's functionality, but I haven't heard of anybody using it. Contrast that to Apple's Notes app, which is universally used if you're a Mac/iOS user.
I remember Muse. I checked out a lot of these "tools for thought" at that time because the pandemic slammed me with way more work than I could possibly hope to get done. Can't say I looked at it very long, and it's not surprising that it didn't catch on. Reasons:
Pricing: It was a subscription for $100/year or something. Not necessarily a dealbreaker, but see the next point. You can indeed set your price too high.
Limited functionality: AFAICT it was a pretty small part of the problem for most people. It's sort of like an Obsidian extension in terms of what it brought to the table.
Stuck in the Apple ecosystem: A lot of software developers fool themselves into thinking everyone uses Apple. You're throwing away most of the market when you do this, even if it's what you want to do.
> Muse got there for a few thousand people, but the economics of prosumer software means that just isn’t enough. You need tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to make the cost of development sustainable.
Then don't throw away most of the market by creating a product for the folks in your bubble.
Ah, I remember using this and wanting very hard to like it but it was just bad.
Very opinionated (who needs more than 5 colors?), ink line on iPad looking atrocious, no zooming, canvas limited in weird way, some features not sticking at all.
In the end I dropped iPad (metaphorically) for SuperNote for my hand notes and am very happy with the choice. If you’re in the market for such apps Defter Notes was one of the best I’ve seen.
I thought it needed pie menus (and user definable pie menus, not just one gimmicky fixed pie menu with only a few commands, like some apps have). They work quite well with pens. It's a shame they didn't support that.
This is interesting and helpful! Thanks a lot for sharing.
I'm building an AI Note app focusing on ADHDer and find that this resonates well:
> We were too unfocused in our target market, and ended up as an “everything app.”
I'm still trying to find traction and the specific use cases for it but not sure whether it's clear enough. Would be great if you can have a look on the app and share your thoughts - https://saner.ai/
Muse Retrospective · Adam Wiggins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408507 - Feb 2024 (10 comments)
(but it never made the front page, so I've spawned a fresh copy)