Hopping in here to share my a couple quick thoughts on Arc and updates from the last little bit.
First ā a piece of feedback I hear a lot is that Arc tries to do too much. In a sense, I totally agree ā there are some features, like the Library to manage screenshots and downloads, that I still havenāt found a use for. Side-by-side tabs ā I can handle that with regular window management.
Others, though, like Easels ā essentially, note-taking and diagramming in the browser ā Iāve really come around on. I may be using them in an unintended way, but Easels are really powerful. One of the things I havenāt seen many people talk about is that you can take āliveā screenshots and include them on easels ā essentially, you can resize your browser window to frame a site in a certain way, drag a screenshot of that site, and save it to an easel. You can then make it a āliveā screenshot and add it to an Easel, and Arc will remember the window size and shape and the size and location of the area you dragged, and fetch content from that website whenever you load up that Easel. I donāt think that makes sense, so maybe best to share an example.
Iāve created an Easel called News, which contains live-updating āportalsā in to specific areas of my favourite news sites:
This means that rather than opening a bunch of sites to see whatās new, I can open just this easel and get a quick peak at whatās going on in the world. I can hover over each site to easily jump to the full site, and I can even actually click any article link in those āscreenshotsā to open any article directly. Each screenshot actually acts like a whole mini browser window.
You can also share these Easels to non-Arc users (albeit without the screenshots live-updating ā theyāre frozen in time outside of Arc), so feel free to take a look: News
The founder of Arc did a bit of a media tour recently that resulted in a couple of good articles, the best of which I believe is this one.
Re: too many features, I think theyāre thinking about this and weāll see some reworking of the product this year to simplify things. To quote:
In the same Twitter video, Miller said theyāre going to simplify the browser further. āWeāre gonna sculpt it down. Weāre gonna refine it,ā Miller says. āScott Forstall [former head of Apple software design before Tim Cook fired him for the disastrous Apple Maps rollout] gave us some really great feedback. Youāve built a saxophone; musicians love saxophones, but they are really difficult to master, really difficult to figure out. You gotta make Arc into a grand piano now. How can you just walk up to it ā no one needs to know how the white and black keys work ā you just start poking around and you can end up like Mozart one day.ā
