Yet another Hacker News

94 points iFreilicht 4 hours ago 15 comments

hnisjafx40 3 hours ago | parent

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.

iFreilicht 2 hours ago | parent

What do you mean by that? To me it seems like every single letter is pretty much hand-written and attributed to one or two team members.

zazuke 3 hours ago | parent

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.

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ [2] https://www.inkandswitch.com/embark/

iFreilicht 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dunham 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse/ [2]: https://allume.com/

evek 3 hours ago | parent

They are also some of the folks behind the Local-first conference.

Recordings: https://www.youtube.com/@localfirstconf/videos

Recap: https://www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/dispatch-019/

spiralganglion 1 hour ago | parent

Don't miss our "Lab Day" talks from this year's Local-First Conf, which are posted on our own channel: https://youtube.com/@inkandswitch

digdugdirk 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks for posting this! Love your team's work.

throwaw12 3 hours ago | parent

App they have mentioned is indeed looks awesome: https://allume.com/#pricing

But why subscription for local-only software?

subjars 2 hours ago | parent

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.

Topfi 2 hours ago | parent

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.

iFreilicht 2 hours ago | parent

Have you played the arcade game in the letter C yet? If not, then you've probably missed other stuff as well.

krisoft 2 hours ago | parent

> Play with it! Click/drag everywhere.

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.

monkeydust 1 hour ago | parent

Yea, it went from cool -> annoying pretty quick for me.

Vishal_Max 1 hour ago | parent

I did not understand why this was cool until i tried holding and dragging it!