
Muse: designing a studio for ideas - walterbell
https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse-studio-for-ideas.html
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whywhywhywhy
Starting to feel the fact Apple decided tablets should be siloed from
traditional computing is really just starting to hurt development in these
areas.

There is some great work here but also you see things like the web clipper,
it's already accepting that research web browsing is best done on a computer
so then because of the tablet silo they need to create custom tech and run
servers just to get the content from two devices next to each other. If Apple
had a tablet Macbook you'd just be dragging and dropping from the browser to
Muse.

When Microsoft launched their Surface line, I and many others joked that is
was the wrong direction but as the years pass it's starting to feel more and
more absurd to me that my tablet workspace and my workstation workspace are
two incompatible operating systems.

If Apple hadn't been so strict and had a laptop line similar to the Surface as
well as the iPad, does anyone seriously think anyone would be pursuing
software like this in the locked down tablet OS when they could be doing both
streams of work on the one device instead.

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jclardy
I agree with your thoughts on siloing being a poor decision by Apple, but I
see nothing here that couldn’t already be done all on device using existing
APIs.

Apple already added drag & drop between apps, you can drag text/images from
safari straight into notes (or any app that implements drag/drop.) The web
clipper could be implemented as a safari extension and work in a nearly
identical way.

~~~
Terretta
Agree with this comment.

It also (superficially) appears they haven’t studied deeper (more academic,
research or UX driven) prior art. It’s easy to beat Preview or PDF Expert.
Harder to surpass the more innovative examples.

In particular, there’s a lot of depth in Liquid Text:

[https://www.liquidtext.net](https://www.liquidtext.net)

But also a couple of the infinite canvas note anything apps, especially ones
that also bring in audio recording or other ‘mixed media’ while covering
swaths of the thinking outlined here.

Finally, there’s an irony that all the video embeds on this article are
disabled on my iPad Pro. Do they even iPad?

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endergen
They mention Liquid Text being an inspiration

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daralthus
I am in completely favour of spatial solutions, but sooner or later you hit
the problem that the graph of associations don't map well to 2D unless you
denormalize it (like in databases). Which just means if you want to reference
an item in multiple places you have to duplicate them and you loose the link
between them.

The solution for Muse would be to not put the item in the drawer but the whole
area around it as well. Then when you paste it back somewhere you create a
wormhole in the space that shows the original place now in a different
context. This way you can keep the intuitive zooming and panning and see
duplicated areas that update properly.

To be fair there are already some ways they try to solve this with their point
style wormholes or the "expand and edit content on the drawer" interaction,
but I think they should fully embrace that thought space is not linear.

~~~
walterbell
MindScope on iOS allows an item to be duplicated in different trees, enabling
multiple entry points to the children of that item.

EccoPro (20+ year old Windows app, still functional) also allows an item (and
children) to appear in multiple categories/folders.

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juliushuijnk
My simple(r), free, no ads, alternative: Idea Growr
[https://ideagrowr.com](https://ideagrowr.com)

Focus is mostly on the first stage of capturing all your ideas, and growing
them using question sets. I've partnered with my employer to turn IdeaGrowr
into a more rounded app, with accounts, etc.

If you're interested, I'm writing about the progress over here:
[https://medium.com/idea-growr](https://medium.com/idea-growr)

I'll have to look into Muse more, but it seems very tablet focused. It seems
more focused on the stage where you have the idea and are working out the
details, research, etc. Can you use it to quickly jot down an idea in the
middle of the night?

I like the 'draw on pictures' part. I use the Concepts app for iPad for that.

~~~
walterbell
On Android, the NoteLynx outliner app allows an item to have multiple parents.
It's good for cross-linking notes in multiple contexts.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrodean....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astrodean.notelynxpro&hl=en_US)

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DennisAleynikov
Incredible work on this article! Its the dream mixture of a non linear idea
processor like prezi for presentations mixed with the perfect webclipped + pdf
+ notebook! I am awe of the thoroughness of this concept.

How long have you been working on this work of art?

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TazeTSchnitzel
Reminds me of Microsoft's old Courier concept (remember that?)

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nelsonic
Great article and slick UX! Is any of this Open Source?

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walterbell
Some of their preceding work is open-source, including Capstone, a stylus-
enabled ChromeOS app, [https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-
manuscript.html](https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript.html)

