In today’s world, apps and their data are tightly coupled—but what if each person could pick and choose their own tool for use in a collaborative project? Geoffrey Litt is a researcher working on this problem at MIT. He joins Mark and Adam to talk about email as the original BYOC case study; how shared protocols enable niche software; whether it’s possible to design software for someone other than yourself; and how to accidentally become an expert. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Geoffrey Litt / @geoffreylitt “teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea” Project Cambria MIT Software Design Group Ink & Switch Human-Computer Interaction Doug Engelbart Superorganizers profile of Geoffrey including Muse screenshots Bring Your Own Client email as one of the first internet protocols Pine, Mutt Superhuman, Front, Tempo not many clients support video in HTML emails tractor attachments and the three-point hitch HTML meta tags for Google and Twitter progress enhancement reverse engineering ad blockers end-user programming aspiring programmer progressing from Livejournal to HTML coding PHP Hubspot, Mailchimp “toolmaker humility” from Balint @ Craft Solid accessibility in collaborative writing VS Code won the text editor wars “ed is the standard text editor” episode on video games Flash, Java servlet Changing Minds Bonnie Nardi ethnographic study of distributed problem-solving in spreadsheets Wildcard

Tech product designers could learn from the immense challenges of designing cities. Devon joins Adam and Mark to share her knowledge and passion on urban design and economics. They discuss how open source communities compare to cities; historical preservation versus growth and change; the messy middle of public and private goods; wi-fi spectrum ownership; and what to do when the neighbor’s new building puts shade on your vegetable garden. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Devon Zuegel / @devonzuegel Order without Design (book) Order Without Design (podcast) episode on Seattle and Berlin urban economics, planning, and design The World Bank Venture funding in 2020 Paris city walls path dependence Miami Art Deco historic protection centrally-planned economy TCP/IP Manhattan street grid plan (1811) Eminent Domain 1960s highway revolts Discretionary Review Berlin rent cap artistocracy San Francisco’s privately-owned public spaces (POPOS) LinkedIn public cafe Sacré-Cœur Basilica La Défense Paris business district biography of Gustave Eiffel first-past-the-post voting seasteading charter cities Special Economic Zone Shenzen electromagnetic spectrum auction Georgism universal basic income air rights Prospectus On Próspera voxel zoning laws in Japan no on-street parking in Tokyo The High Cost of Free Parking A History of Future Cities City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism

Pricing a product is one of the most difficult and high-stakes part of running a software business. Adam, Mark, and Lennart discuss the latest pricing updates for Muse; the pros and cons of selling through the iOS App Store; concerns with subscription payments for software; and why it’s important to be experimental and iterative with your prices. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Lennart Ziburski Potsdam, Germany Ink & Switch essay on the Muse prototype Desktop Neo The Cloudfall Muse pricing idea maze psychology of why most prices end in .99 conversion rate freemium total cost of ownership Things Mars rover software static linking Heroku pricing pricing books: Priceless, Don’t Just Roll the Dice, Pricing on Purpose pricing for the enterprise Notion previous pricing / free tier with 1000 blocks Sublime Text nagware We’ve Always Had Freemium, It’s Called Piracy Muse newsletter where we first asked beta users to weigh in on price

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have transformed how we come to a shared understanding about our world. Tobias has been writing about social media for half a decade. He joins Mark and Adam to discuss velocity and virality in information dissemination; how to train your YouTube algorithm; rage tweeting; and how to improve the internet we all inhabit. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Tobias Rose-Stockwell and his writing MUD TinTin++ techno-optimism clickbait This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit The Social Dilemma The Dark Psychology of Social Networks Jonathan Haidt How to Stop Misinformation Before It Gets Shared Renée DiResta moral psychology algorithmic feeds System 1 and System 2 thinking dopamine hit dunk quote-tweeting The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority How to Disagree moral grandstanding episode on The Information Age the intellectual dark web “The internet is the Freak Liberation Front.” the food pyramid yellow journalism Central Park zoo escape (1874) Great Moon Hoax (1835) Prisoner’s Dilemma Substack Plandemic Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach

Computer scientist Molly Mielke joins Mark and Adam to discuss co-creation between humans and computers. They explore product design as a fusion of creativity and analytics and the conflict between consumer preferences and the vision of computing. They also touch upon emerging social norms in collaborative software and the revival of skeuomorphism.

Probabilistic modeling is useful for answering all kinds of questions, from assessing financial risk to making engineering time estimates. Yet spreadsheets are poor at this job, which is why Taimur and his colleagues are building Casual. Taimur talks with Mark and Adam about ranges as an intuitive way to estimate; the usefulness of Monte Carlo simulations; and the role of math in dating cave paintings. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Taimur Abdaal Casual Not Overthinking Airtable Drake‘s equation line of best fit “not even wrong” Flatland Monte Carlo simulation R closed-form solution RoboCup Slack (management book) queueing theory The Principles of Product Development Flow tail risk expected value gambler’s fallacy distribution shapes e.g. bell curve fan chart Samo Burja of Bismark Analysis meta-analysis preregistered studies confidence interval false positive, false negative onboarding episode A/A testing carcinization combinatorics two-tailed test

Video games are often on the leading edge of technical, design, and social innovation in the software world. Mark and Adam discuss what productivity tools can learn from games including the culture of performance; tools like Twitch and Discord; and end-user programming via scripting and modding. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Seattle cherry blossoms episodes with Rasmus Andersson and Andy.Works Serious Play “death march” in game development developer experience esports Age of Empires II Counter-Strike FEZ; Papers, Please; Baba Is You Core-A Gaming Playing to Win the metagame the Olympics Nvidia frame rate counters Nintendo Switch Makepad code folding Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) Cyberpunk 2077 and everything is securities fraud Duke Nukem Forever No Man’s Sky and launch controversy Mass Effect, Horizon Zero Dawn Muse onboarding scripting, modding, skinning tower defense A Small Matter of Programming My Life as a Night Elf Priest World of Warcraft free-to-play (F2P) games Team Fortress Valve Left 4 Dead Steam Valve employee handbook Candy Crush, Wooga, FarmVille Twitch Justin.tv CGP Grey on Twitch American Truck Simulator Among Us, US congressperson livestreams consumer surplus Discord  T90 Zero Punctuation, Girlfriend Reviews Game Maker’s Toolkit Metroid Nintendo Power magazine haptic feedback Batman: Arkham Asylum / detective mode Tetris max-out score four-minute mile speedruns Twitch paid subscriber emotes Myst built in Hypercard Strider, Angband, rougelikes Lucas Pope, Return of the Obra Dinn

Design and engineering polymath Rasmus Andersson joins Mark and Adam to talk about his new project, Playbit. Play as a means of discovery and learning; virtualization as an underexploited technology for making safe playspaces for programming; and whether macOS will still exist in ten years. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Rasmus Andersson @rsms Playbit What counts as a weed? maskros flowers “write access to your entire worldview” Jason Yuan on fidgitability Virginia Postrel on work vs play Rust Roadster in space foam roll “Adamisms” e.g. make it real Hobo Go, Go by Example slow hunch malleable software xorg.conf convention over configuration macOS notarization woes Chrome OS sandboxing GPU time-sharing write once, run anywhere macOS virtualization, Hyper-V, KVM Linux namespaces Ruby gem: bundle root user An app can be a home-cooked meal Replit Dreams The Cathedral and the Bazaar Macromedia Director demoscene, BBS culture MOD trackers Gameboy DJ performance Raspberry Pi flip displays teenage engineering Alfazeta flipdots vendor

When you pay for software, are you paying for the data storage or the interface? Balint is the founder of Craft, a writing app designed for iPad. He chats with Adam and Mark about design conventions for multimodal input; why import/export is so important; and how to have humility about how your product fits into your customer’s life. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Balint Orosz of Craft Budapest: bridges, parliament building, castle Making computers better Skyscanner Markdown Mac Catalyst retina displays homeostasis multimodal input Craft on data ownership Ulysses I/O TestBundle format best of breed Instagram DSLR cameras, RAW format, Lightroom bidirectional links Excel low floor, high ceiling  iOS share sheet SVG JSON Visual Studio Code Google Photos going paid churn Small Giants Office 365 revenue via Microsoft 2020 annual report bootstrapping

Agenda is software that encodes an unusual philosophy for note-taking. Alex of Agenda joins Mark and Adam to talk about being an indie developer; note-taking as a technique for calming the mind; and the benefits of community and learning tools socially. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Alexander Griekspoor Agenda easter egg Papers biology wet lab R, Jupyter, Matlab CodeWarrior open loops Parkinson’s law Drew McCormack Agenda community Zettelkasten deep dive on notes tools search engine optimization localizations by Agenda community volunteers authentic marketing “cash cow” business model