23 // A First Look at Kosmik

Just like last week, I’ll have a look at another tool for thought, and might make some comparisons to Formable.

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I have an email saying “Your invite has been approved 🎉 As a reward for being one of our first users, you will get a year of Kosmik for free!”. It’s been lying in my inbox since March. Back then I didn’t have a Mac (or iPad) that would support the software, but for I couple of months I do now, and have just been procrastinating on it.

I quite regularly read intriguing tweets from Paul Rony (Kosmik co-founder), without even following him until now.

So I’m excited to finally download the app now.

I’m still early enough to get my first name as a username 👍

I’m not a big user of spacial canvases, so I don’t know what to expect from Kosmik.

So one can add cards, websites, photos, files, text and post its.

One thing I immediately notice is that changes sometimes take ages. E.g. dragging some text out of a card gray’s it out until changes are synced. It can still be edited all the time, so I don’t quite get why it’s grayed out in the first place.
Dragging items in “live copies” like the ones with the images above also don’t sync immediately.
Interestingly, it’s the same when I’m offline.

I’ll take this as a learning for Formable. Some actions there also aren’t super fluid, and I’m not prioritizing them. Yet when using another tool I find such things super annoying.

Alright, let’s continue going through Kosmik’s features.

Some things I notice:

• Nice: you can drag text out of web pages or files. Not backlinked though. In general I wonder how useful it is to keep links of webpages like this around if their content changes. Kosmik’s trying to bridge two formats here.

• Relations / arrows on the canvas are just a visual feature. I don’t see them enabling other features.

• I got the app to freeze twice 😔 e.g. when trying to upload a photo

Alright, feature wise there’s not that much more to discover.

I wonder what workflows Kosmik could solve. I for example used use OneNote to organize my life. As far as I understand Kosmik’s marketing, the tool is mainly targeted towards ideation and linking thoughts at the moment, not so much for managing tasks for example.

I’m sure transclusion (live copies) is a useful feature. For now I’d say some of the basics still have to be improved. I’m not here to review or suggest using this product anyway, but rather to see what other people are doing.

I’m curious how Kosmik’s journey continues, especially with the upcoming multiplayer stuff. Their idea there is to copy items from other people / share them and maybe republish updated versions later on. Interesting take, and quite different from other apps like Figma.

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