We've been in this space for a lil bit too with eesel (https://eesel.app) and it's really cool to see more people tackling these problems. It's about time we fix this.
This post resonates a lot! I think finding a clear focus and going deep on it takes you places no one (even you) can anticipate in advance. It's how you can create something amazing.
I felt that personally working on eesel [1]. We kept a tight focus on the problem (making it easier to refer back to your work more easily) and it's become far more than we could've expected. Ironically, the classic "is this a company or a feature" question might actually be a validation of keeping scope.
The only caveat I'd add to the post is that you should try to solve only one problem, but you should spend time exploring before hand to discover the broader set of problems and prioritise carefully.
It's so tough taking stances to defend things of 'intangible' (or at least hard to quantify) value like Apple has. I worry it's almost 'inevitable' for companies to cave in.
After a while, we learned that what our users really wanted was to have everything in one place.
This is so spot on! We're having similar learnings with eesel [1] too. Work is far too scattered across apps. Thanks for sharing your journey so far and congrats on the launch!
I mean, you change them. A big part of politics is contextual to where you live, and rural people have different problems than people in cities and suburbs.
You might still be a liberal but the type of liberal that lives in, say rural New England is vastly different than a California liberal. They are going to be much more practical. Demonizing cars like you might in a big city makes no sense in a place that will never get public transportation. Social services, especially things like public housing aren’t high on list of needs or wants. Public (K-12) education is a majority of tax dollars, for cultural reasons and a stigma against people who are uneducated. And so on. Different parts of the USA will have totally different value systems.
My parents are retired in SC. Other than "no guns at our house" they hide their liberal views and end up finding left wing friends through weird whisper networks. The huge majority of their friends and neighbors are red (they live in a very white and quite wealthy area).
i don't use many webapps at all. an etherpad here or there, github/gitlab, stackoverflow. most work related sites are research into problems or documentation or learning new stuff (blogs, videos).
manually adding apps/sites is to much work since i want to add everything.
when debugging an issue i have related sites all over the place, that i want to group somehow. same when doing research for a new project, or simply when dealing with multiple customers. i use firefox where i can manually group tabs into containers. that helps, but it doesn't cover history, so if i close a tab, the page is no longer associated with the project. for bookmarks, i have to remember to bookmark each page, but then i can't tell which ones are more important or more recent. it would be nice to if grouping could be more automatic based on heuristics like keywords found in the page and also tab history.
Thanks for trying eesel out and sharing your thoughts! Helps us heaps. Some pointers on that:
1. To edit the rules for a Folder, open the Folder and head to "Add pages" > "Automatically". We've heard it a few times that discoverability of this isn't great, and it's definitely something we should improve.
3. To clarify, everything is local by default and only pages you explicitly share by adding to a Workspace, a shared Folder and so on are shared.
4. I imagine we'll want to support eesel profiles at some point to better separate personal and work things, but one workaround till then is to have different Chrome profiles and install eesel on both.
Let us know if you have any other thoughts that pop up!
We've been in this space for a lil bit too with eesel (https://eesel.app) and it's really cool to see more people tackling these problems. It's about time we fix this.
Keen to be inspired and learn! :)