Some sad (but possibly long-term good) news from Ink & Switch:
I’m really proud of the product, brand, and community we’ve built with Muse. Despite all of that, we didn’t manage to make it a sustainable business. As a result we will be downsizing: most of the team, including me, will be departing next month.
Longtime Muse team member Adam Wulf will be continuing to develop Muse as a solo entrepreneur.
Adam is opening up the beta for Muse 3.0 in a few days.
I’d been worried Muse was too beautiful to last in its current form. Specifically, I was concerned that Adam Wiggins’ money was preventing Muse from being forced to meet enough paying customers’ needs. It’s hard to build a business on tools that spend their time designing limits in the software, rather than designing visible features. Even harder when you can afford to do it indefinitely, or at least until the investment fund decides to bet on something new.
Sincerely hoping Adam Wulf will do well developing it solo, whether his overhead is low enough that he can keep Muse weird or whether he bets on attracting a broader audience.
I was concerned about this when they started to mention team features when in my opinion the app was geared towards a personal use. Steering into that direction meant they were looking for resources from business companies.
I’ve never heard of Muse. The blog post mentions file syncing. I’ve looked at so many file syncing apps (filesysnc, syncthing, and more ) that I’m surprised that I’ve never seen Muse mentioned.
What was unique about Muse? What made it stand out?
I don’t see where it mentions file sync. You can add PDFs and images to your boards but it’s not a document repo. It’s for sketching/prototyping UI/moving ideas around spatially, so more like Curio, Kinopio, Freeform, etc.
I assumed they meant file sync in the first sentence of the blog post “I’ve been working on Muse for four years. In that time our team has built a one-of-a-kind thinking tool and the world’s first large-scale local-first sync system.”
I haven’t used any applications in that space, which explains why I haven’t heard of Muse, or any of the apps that you listed.
Ah, I see, yeah. That’s a funny blind spot–they are so deep on advancing local-first sync technology (CDRT etc.) that they probably didn’t notice that most people would think of files first. Same for some of their customers (like me, heh.)
It’s a really fun category of apps if you like to play with ideas a certain way. Freefrom is the easiest entry for Apple users.