🥊 fighting feature creep
Integrated software's big comeback
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for the last few issues you’re probably aware by now that we care about creatives, their tools and how computing influences the way they work. Kosmik is designed to be your background tool, the commonplace book you summon when you want to write down an idea or find that image you saved a while back.
But what does that mean and how will we get there?
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear”. What an opening phrase! This is how Marc Weiser starts his seminal article “The Computer for the 21st century”. The author notes that as technologies get more refined, they tend to recess into our background life (for example literature, more precisely writing, which can now be found on street signs, candy wrappers, etc).
As personal computing advances, it recesses in the background too — but what seems to happen right now is also that software itself, applications and services are gradually getting abstracted away by each new operating system and now artificial intelligence.
Integrated software
This has been a constant movement in computing history. In the 1990s when you were buying a spreadsheet program it probably did not came with a graphics package bundled. You had to buy another piece of software that would render graphs, pie charts, etc.
This is how “integrated software” became popular. Instead of a very advanced spreadsheet and a separate very advanced pie charts software you were getting a mostly sufficient integrated software containing those two pieces. The underlying reasoning was that most people (including many businesses) do not need the most advanced features of the majority of software.
Technology always wins and we all know that some of the most beloved apps on our computers are now riddled with what is known as “feature creep”. It is easy to add features and to grow a product beyond its original use case. I think that the “one product, one company” nature of many start ups amplifies this phenomenon.
At Kosmik we feel that we’re approaching a moment where feature creep could become a problem. When we began to really scale our user base earlier this year we got a lot of feedback. Some users were asking us to add backlinks, others were asking us for diagramming tools, some wanted a more powerful image editor. Every button we add makes it harder to make sure that Kosmik behaves in the right way and delivers the most delightful experience possible.
Feature creep and integrated software
Kosmik is a very horizontal software, it is bound to add features that are not part of its core because its core is to be inherently malleable to help people do research and organize their thoughts, alone and in teams.
The answer to this fear of feature creep came from one team using Kosmik. In an agency of 8 people, it can already be difficult to keep everybody on the same page. Projects are numerous, clients are stressed and time is sparse! That team had decided to add Slack to its workflow to streamline communication, but as they grew it became apparent that slack itself needed to be tended to, pruned regularly and generally required maintenance.
Almost by accident they started to put post-it notes, text messages and even draw on a Kosmik universe that became their bulletin board.
This was an eye opener for us. We had never anticipated this kind of workflow being possible in Kosmik. We do not have a chat feature and we even lack a comment option (that’s coming soon though).
However, this is what integrated software essence is → you trade power for flexibility. You trade spikiness for composability!
A “commonplace” research tool.
Our goal at Kosmik is to create the integrated software for visual research. Here’s a sneak peek at a small update we’re working on for our top bar. It’s simpler, lighter, and as you can see it also drops the search icon (which we moved somewhere else).
We want you to have all the tools you need at your fingertips. We know how it feels to:
open browser
search
right click to open in a new tab
favorite
right click to save in downloads folder
move into dropbox
copy in figma/keynote
share
rinse and repeat
We want Kosmik to feel like this AppleWorks start screen. Just click and begin. Start writing this brief, start browsing the web, start curating those images. And do that with your colleagues, friends and clients.
We’re also going to double down on one feature that makes Kosmik unique → tags within the canvas. If you’ve read our previous issues, we’re working on implementing “workspaces” in Kosmik to allow you to work more easily in teams. Tags will now be bound to the workspace, allowing you to build several research databases easily. A proper tag button will be introduced, displaying all the tags of the workspace. Form there you’ll be able to filter the content of the universe, link to items in other universes or import all the items linked to a tag in particular.
We're also reworking search and adding comments!
Those future of Kosmik is to become the integrated visual database for architects, creative directors, students, and knowledge workers at large. It will never be Safari, it will never be Dropbox, it will never be Word. But it will provide enough capabilities to allow you to do things that none of those applications can do on their own. It allows you to browse, save, organize and write.
We’re welcoming back integrated software. Thank you to our Kosmik users for being on this journey with us!
Until next week -
Paul 🧑🚀