Back to MyMind

I have a confession: I’m back three weeks after publishing a piece about migrating off MyMind and going all-in with Fabric. Here’s why it didn’t work out.

The perfect tool for visual inspiration?

Currently, no tool can fully replace MyMind as a repository for visual inspiration. I’ve tried several alternatives that excel in certain aspects, but they all fall short in others. These limitations become apparent when searching for visual inspiration during project work, when I need to find things.

How Fabric falls short with tall screenshots

Here’s my experience with Fabric. When searching for landing page inspiration, Fabric presents several challenges:

1. The grid overview is limited to resizable squares, which forces all thumbnails into square containers.
2. This works for square images, but it’s problematic for tall website screenshots.
3. The image viewing experience is frustrating:
   1. You’re only shown downscaled preview images, no progressive loading of a higher resolution when zooming in. For tall images, it’s simply impossible to see details without downloading it first.
   2. You cannot right-click images to open or download them (which wouldn’t hep much with the downscaled variant anyways).

Alternative Solutions

Eagle

Eagle, a Mac and Windows app, offers compelling features:

• Full local data ownership
• Fast general performance and smooth zoom
• Quick full-size views
• No subscription

However, it has limitations:

• Now view mode where tall portrait images and other formats are represented in harmony
• No mobile app
• Lacks related image discovery

Cosmos

Cosmos is beautiful for discovery, but:

• Cosmos has similar tall screenshot issues as Fabric.
• Cosmos lacks zoom capability for details in tall screenshots.
• Comos’ discovery always includes images from other users. Sometimes that’s great, but often I want to focus my research my own library.

Why I returned to MyMind

As I had deleted all content, I had to rebuild my collection. Starting fresh with MyMind was liberating. This time I decided to focus exclusively on design inspiration. This experience helped me realize why MyMind works for me.

Perfect handling of various aspect ratios, with tall full-page images cropped from the top:

Perfect full view of tall screenshots with vertical scrolling makes web screenshots feel like real web pages:

Last but not least: My beloved “Same vibe” feature still outperforms all competitors, great results presented as a large view:

A targeted approach

Returning to MyMind with this strategic change of using it exclusively for design inspiration feels great. All my spaces and tags are now design related, so no more random bookmarks, shopping lists, or media recommendations dilute my browsing and search results. This focused approach has also increased the value I get from serendipity mode.

I’m happy that the breakup didn’t last. This experiment helped me understand what I value most in a visual inspiration tool. Sometimes you need to leave something to appreciate why it worked so well.

Here’s a recording showing the points made more visually: