They have one of the best articles out there, and now the page is great too. Fun and innovative.
My favorite article, in case you haven't read it already, is local-first [1], or I recently read the embark, dynamic documents for making plans. These always give me so much inspiration.
Wow, embark is very well done! I feel like there is some sort of solution space between notes, whiteboards, jupyter notebooks and Arcan FE that could make knowledge organization much easier, but it's such a huge space to even comprehend in the first place I can only ever hold part of the solution in my head.
I also enjoyed Muse[1], which was made available in the iOS app store, and is now being maintained as "Allume"[2] (an unnamed company bought the Muse name).
Essentially a digital pinboard, it was an interesting experiment in "designed for tablet" UX and was developed far enough to be an app. The gesture based UX, nested board, PDF reader, and transclusion of PDF fragments are all interesting ideas.
It looks cool! But man is it frustrating that nothing is consistent. Some things change when I click. Some things change when I drag. Some things seemingly doesn't do anything at all.
If it is intentionally like that, great. But I just don't find the experience pleasant.
Their articles are always worth a read, especially their efforts on CRDT are a great inspiration for improving UX. Not sure I’m getting the full experience of this homepage on mobile though, will have to check later.
There’s still currently the need of a server to synchronise data between Allume clients (Mac + iPad + iPhone companion app), but it is completely useable offline on one device. Adam Wulf, the now solo developer of it, mentioned that a local P2P sync is in the pipeline.
Ink and Switch's stuff always makes me want to go rebuild something, and the homepage being playable is very on brand for them. Curious how much of it is bespoke versus falling out of their own Automerge tooling.
[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ [2] https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/
Essentially a digital pinboard, it was an interesting experiment in "designed for tablet" UX and was developed far enough to be an app. The gesture based UX, nested board, PDF reader, and transclusion of PDF fragments are all interesting ideas.
[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse/ [2]: https://allume.com/
It looks cool! But man is it frustrating that nothing is consistent. Some things change when I click. Some things change when I drag. Some things seemingly doesn't do anything at all.
If it is intentionally like that, great. But I just don't find the experience pleasant.
Recordings: https://www.youtube.com/@localfirstconf/videos
Recap: https://www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/dispatch-019/
But why subscription for local-only software?
https://www.liquidtext.net is more PDF-focused, but the workspace is cool.