[adamwiggins]

Evernote is a good example of software that I think had a lot of promise but has decayed in quality and performance over time.

No self-hosted sync service at the moment. At the moment we've got our hands full with making it work well in a production setting. But I'd like to see a world where generic sync services (either as hosted services or self-hosted) is commonplace.

[reilly3000]

I think decay is an excellent word to describe Evernote’s journey, or at least the bits where I was involved. The UIs became progressively less usable, and somehow felt more fragile. My own use of it was experiment-> embrace -> decay. I can’t just blame the tool, that pattern of changing productivity tools is more of a me problem it turns out.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about an ideal tool for capturing and organizing thought and Muse appears to have addressed my own ambitions and those of experts in the field. Congrats on the great work. With this release I won’t need to get an iPad to try it, but after reading this post I sure want one.

To that end, I’m curious about user stories from desktop-first, and/or desktop-only Muse users.

[adamwiggins]

Yes, we're curious to see how pure desktop usage evolves. A big part of the whole "thinking workspace" concept is the more relaxed posture of tablet use, the ability to scribble on things, etc.

That said, I've used Muse for Mac heavily for the past six months and find it's strongest when I am doing more text-oriented work. I'll also be curious to see how people use in practice and whether the value prop is really all your devices used in tandem (desktop, tablet, phone) or whether there are strong uses cases for just one at a time.

[furypt]

I've recently read the local-first article and thought this could a good solution for many apps to avoid database servers. This in turn would enable more business models using licenses (e.g. Sublime Text) instead of subscriptions.

I also believe that in the future we'll have these generic sync services you're talking about, just like today we have file syncing services. I actually believe we could start having them today and get most of the benefits of having a local-first sync service. I think we could have a relational database server (something which most devs are used to) running somewhere, paid/hosted directly by a user/company, together with a protocol implemented by a local daemon that allows apps to find that database server. This local daemon could be provided by a service (e.g. Apple Business, Syncthing) that provides group membership, so a set of users and devices could access the same database server (and corresponding database). This solution would always require internet access to be able to use the app, but that's already the normal today, and looking at how the technology is advancing (thinking Starlink, 5G), I can only see that becoming less of a problem.

For completeness, I also don't think a local-first sync service can be implemented with file syncing services + SQLite today, even if you only allow changes when online. First there are still chances of multiple people changing the database at the same time, which is not ok because file syncing services only see conflicts at the file-level and they would not be able to recover from them automatically. Finally, it'd probably also be weird to see a SQLite file in a folder somewhere in the file syncing service which could be accessed by any app that used this protocol. I would love to see SQLite being part of a local-first sync solution though.

[hosh]

Yeah, I get that you guys got your hands full. I'm curious enough to give this a spin.

Not necessarily a self-hosted sync service so much as an always-on device running this app in the background that accepts changes and stores it locally. That way, if I lose my phone, I have the data backed up on that device, and I should be able to just connect to the sync service and restore from backup. The sync service could still be hosted elsewhere.

[adamwulf]

The sync server itself also acts as an online backup too - if you lose all of your devices you can login with the same account and re-download.