Hello (again)
Introducing Kosmik 3
Dear people of the internet,
After months of work we’re ready to unveil the next version of Kosmik, aptly named: Kosmik 3.
As you know, we’ve spent the better part of the summer working on adding a more robust sync engine to Kosmik, and doubling down on the features that makes Kosmik unique. As we worked on that next version of Kosmik, it became apparent that we needed to make radical choices to take Kosmik to the next level. Energized by your feedback and very eager to solve our back-end issues once and for all, we decided to cobble-up a prototype of Kosmik using entirely different technologies. The results were so good that we decided to rewrite the whole product and transition to a more standard and future-proof codebase.
🧞 Building the proactive canvas
Since the first release of Kosmik in 2019, canvases have become a staple of most productivity apps and a dominant UI paradigm. From tldraw to Miro and Figma, spatial interfaces have finally won their place in the computing landscape.
But a gap remains in the market: the spatial canvas for knowledge work. Countless essays have been written about how the modern computing world (mobile apps that acts as silos for data, platforms that makes everything incompatible, web-first apps that breaks consistency) makes us users less productive even as machines gets much better in terms of hardware. With the advent of better LLMs, smarter agents and generative AI as a whole we believe that there has never been a better time to build a spatial-first workspace.
We’ve published our own thoughts on the matter, you can read them here:
🧞 Making a proactive canvas — June 7th 2024
🟧 Growing up and becoming Kosmik — June 14th 2024
🟧 It can browse but it’s not a browser — July 19th 2024
There is something there. Over the last 6 months, we’ve learned more than in the years prior. We’ve switched the Kosmik codebase from Swift to typescript in order to ship a windows app and make it possible to collaborate on the web. We’ve added a multiplayer mode, paid plans, tags and many more features. more importantly we’ve figured out what you like Kosmik for.
The combination of a browser and an infinite canvas in a single package makes Kosmik a very powerful software. Press W, find the right links, answers, image, quote. Capture them and catalog them on the canvas and get to work. Write that essay, create that moodboard, share that product requirement document, build that asset library. Click share and invite your whole team to work with you.
This meta-layer that makes it possible to aggregate pre-existing assets and files, access the whole internet and generate new insights is the seed of what we believe will be the next major breakthrough in productivity software.
If you’d like to beta test Kosmik 3 you can fill this very short (less than 2 minutes) typeform and we’ll invite you next week! We also have a new website up where we’ll add more informations as we prepare to launch Kosmik 3.0 publicly.
♻️ Rewriting Kosmik
We’re extremely excited for this next version of Kosmik and we hope that you’re excited for it too!
This week we’ve updated Kosmik 2 one last time before transitioning to Kosmik 3. This update brings many fixes and ensures that you’ll be able to use Kosmik 2 for a long time. Kosmik 3 is a full rewrite of the app, from the canvas to the database.
Under the hood, we’ve decided to use much ore standard technology: HTML for the canvas and PostGres for the database. Kosmik will still take good care of your data and we remain extremely focused on having the most robust privacy stand possible but we will now be a much more classic, centralized app (like Figma or Notion). This is not an easy choice for us and I know some of you will resent it, but this is the best path forward to ensure that Kosmik remains a vibrant, thriving company shipping an awesome product.
In just 56 days we were able to have feature parity with our current app. 30 days later, here’s everything we’ve added to this new app already:
Single sign-on
Workspaces
Stability
Consistency
Templates (publish+duplicate)
Simpler multiplayer invites flow
Auto-tagging (using some AI)
Video and audio file support on the canvas
🚀 Shipping Kosmik 3
Kosmik 3 finally introduces many of the features you’ve been asking us about for a long time. It contains all the features of Kosmik 2 plus all of the above in a much leaner, cleaner and stable package. It represents the culmination of many months of hard work and our future.
This release is going to be staged between October and November with our first beta launching next week. you can already subscribe to the waitlist by completing this very short (⏱️less than 2 minutes) typeform.
💰 A note on paid plans and migrating your data:
If you’re a paid Kosmik 2 user → Your subscription will be transferred to Kosmik 3.
If you’re a paid (lifetime) Kosmik user → You’ll keep all of your advantages for ever on Kosmik 3 too.
If you’d like to migrate your data over from Kosmik 2 to Kosmik 3 please get in touch with us at hello@kosmik.app. We will not have an automated migration path for at least a few months but we’re here and ready to help if you’d like to transfer your assets from 2 to 3 right now. Otherwise we encourage you to start fresh if you can.
Until next time,
Paul