Show HN: Muse – Tool for Thought on iPad
Hey all, Muse cofounder here. I’ve been on Hacker News 13 years but this is my first Show HN. You might know me from YC08 and as Heroku cofounder and author of 12factor.net.<p>Today my team and I are launching Muse, a thinking tool.<p>Engineers sometimes talk about “typing problems” and “thinking problems”;  Muse is for the latter. For example: designing a distributed system, doing a deep read of an algorithms paper, or creating a product roadmap.<p>My colleagues and I spent a few years doing research at a lab called Ink &amp; Switch. You can read HN discussions of our publications on software performance [1], the creative process [2], and local-first software [3].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18506170" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18506170</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20255457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20255457</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21581444" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21581444</a><p>One research question for us was whether touchscreens could ever be as powerful as desktop tools like vim or emacs. That resulted a prototype we named Muse. We saw commercial potential and spun it out of the lab last year.<p>A founding insight for Muse is that deep thinking happens away from the computer. e.g. in a sketchbook, on a whiteboard, or just in your head. There are some up-and-coming tools for thought like Notion and Roam but they’re tied to the desktop&#x2F;laptop form factor and primarily focused on text. We saw an opportunity for a thinking tool that blends together visual media, text, and offers spatial navigation on a tablet.<p>Since this is a technical crowd, you might be interested in some of the challenges building this thing, like maintaining 120fps at all times. There is no concept of opening a file or a loading screen—you just navigate to a document and it’s already there. Ink rendering is another ongoing engineering challenge, from point simplification to curve fitting to stroke masking for the eraser. Happy to talk about any of this in the comments.<p>We’re charging $100&#x2F;year, comparable to other prosumer tools like Dropbox, Evernote, Roam, etc. There’s a generous free tier and you can export your data as a flat files (PNG, PDF, TXT).<p>We’re building in public on Twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MuseAppHQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MuseAppHQ</a> and Mark and I talk shop on our podcast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;museapp.com&#x2F;podcast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;museapp.com&#x2F;podcast</a><p>HN is known for sharp critique, so bring it on. Will also answer questions or accept praise if you feel like doing one of those :-)