Sorry! This is a bad ranking of our search bar and "Ask Muddy" should not always be the first suggestion. Fixing this in our next update.
If you hit any of the other results, it will open the site for you
Compared to Arc -- Muddy is focused on making getting things done together better rather than infinite customization. It's a different set of tradeoffs but with a similar rethinking of the browsing experience.
Electron isn't meant for building a browser and has perf / other limitations. We went with a full Chromium backing with some patches to allow us to write our UI in web tech.
Looking to explore such automations in the near future -- important to us that it feels great to create new files in Muddy (and have Muddy do any of the busywork we are used to)
Started just by building Chromium and Brave and poking around in there and making small changes.
Chromium is huge but has terrific documentation (once you find the current copy) and Google hosted code search. Digging through crbug.com often helped point us in the right direction.
2 unlocks that made us confident to pursue this project:
1) Repeatable way of patching Chromium and keeping up with upstream changes
2) Writing UI in web technology instead of C++ Views toolkit.
1. Spatial canvas based browser (we called it Sail). Had people who loved it but their team refused to learn it. Spatial tools are just incredibly niche and difficult to get started (besides Google Maps).
2. Auto updating across Mac and Windows (in 2024!!). Google Omaha is hard to setup, Sparkle is jank on Windows. Throw in binary delta support and it's an oof.
3. Our team builds Muddy on Muddy and ditched Slack when product got stable. Few other beta users and their companies as well. Slack is super sticky and has some terrific workflows, but more "quality" conversations today happen natively in apps and almost all apps have commenting functionality. Just easier to talk next to the context. So a lot of Slack convo's become "where is X" and we think Muddy will stop the need for those questions all-together.
Great idea for creating some specific videos for engineers, designers, etc.
Browsers are interesting since they can do almost anything but "you can do anything you want!" is intimidating for many new users.
We've given e-mail thought and it's certainly a door we are considering as we keep on building. Has anyone built a browser without thinking about an email client? :P
You are right. We came in letting hosts open experience stores in Airbnbs (try on an Oculus at a hosts home). Difficult to attribute our sales so we moved on.
COVID hit and we had the itch to look at the browser in a different light. Building a browser seemed intimidating...but it was quarantine. Long story short, built a few different ideas and here we are :)
I felt this pain a lot. Never really resonated with all-in-one apps so we always had a few places to check for every project. Figuring out the right links was hard and prone to distraction.
In a way, we like trying new software. Downside is each app has the need to build their own slightly different file system, which makes finding things extra challenging. Wanted to solve with Muddy.
The main difference is that Muddy automatically creates and updates those shared tabs for you based on what's being added to the project timeline (multiplayer feed of apps/websites).
We used some similar tools like Workona in the past but without constant maintenance, links would get stale and we'd abandon it. Wanted something that did that for us automatically.
(Also we support: website annotations, team presence, and letting you rewind a project's timeline back to any point in time)