Health informatics professor in Vancouver who built Manuscripts, a Mac-first productivity and submission-tracking tool for academic researchers

Yeah, I'm muted. So I'm here. And then I can't put in my anything in this field or press any of these buttons. HiPeople contact. This is the HiPeople backslash contact. Hi. We've been doing a lot of front-end redesigns. Yeah. No, hey, you're with friendly developers, so all good. Appreciate that. People content. Okay, I'll send you the request after I got your phone number in there, so that's okay. That should be fine. We'll just, we'll run this, and then I'll, we'll run the interview, and then I'll message you if anything about it. Okay. Yeah, that'd be great. Cool. All right. Okay, I'll stop. So, so yeah, so Hi, Jamie. It's great to meet you. We've just been talking for a few minutes here about manuscripts. And my name is Mark. I work with, I work with Hiary, because we did a little bit of an intro, but kind of like I explained, we're really focused on connecting people, featuring new founders, featuring people that are kind of building new things, new tools, and just kind of passionate about creating and working on, you know, creating products that are going to help other people. So you and I connected on, I saw your product on Reddit, and I wanted to kind of talk with you a little bit more about your product, what got you inspired about it, and yeah, I'll let you take it, take it from here. Great. All right. Thanks. Thanks again, Mark. And I was gravitated to much of what you guys are doing because I think our values are very similar. So I'm a professor of health informatics at a university here in Vancouver. And I have been publishing in the scientific space for several years. And the process of publishing in academia is an arduous one for anyone who has previously done that. It has a number of predefined steps and is very prescriptive in how you interact with journals and editors. And so manuscripts was a, is a tool that solved a particular pain point for me as an academic publishing in the space. And I have created it in such a way that's agnostic to the discipline or to the research area, such that it can be hopefully a useful tool to all academics that are publishing. It provides a number of tools, including calendars, some productivity tools, some writing tools that help streamline the process and make sure that you keep on track your submissions in various locations to various journals. It could, it can be used as a solo researcher, or it can be used as a research coordinator for multiple different groups that you're keeping track of multiple submissions across many different journals. And it, I like to say, it's like, for those who have graduated beyond the spreadsheet, it's, I used to keep track of all of my papers on a, in an Excel spreadsheet. And that was certainly had its moment, had its time, had its utility. But I, I outgrew that eventually. And I, I created a Mac first, you know, forward of Swift forward, you know, a program that could, that could at least solve my issue, which was moving beyond the sort of the individual rows of a spreadsheet and helping me track that in a way that integrated with reminders in a way that integrated with calendar and keep it all sort of within the Mac ecosystem. So pause there and do you have, yeah, let me know if you have questions. So you're a bit, you're a big Mac fan. And then it kind of sounds like this grew out of kind of necessity of your, of your own personal pains when you're trying to find a better way to, to manage your papers and. Yeah. Yeah. And, and also a love for Mac, I would say too. That's the other thing it grew out of. I I've always really I've, I've been a, an Apple user my whole life and particularly learned in AI, the AI era more about Swift. I had programmed a little bit in Swift before, but I hadn't, it wasn't, I wasn't about to hold, learn a whole new language when I was, I'm already a Python programmer in data science. And so I you know, I used AI provided a great opportunity for people to learn new computing languages of which Swift was the one that I took up and I've had a lot of both fun and success building a few different, different apps in for the Mac ecosystem. What other, what other types of apps have you made within Mac or for Mac? These, these are, I have a pattern, which is create tools for myself and then we'll see which ones work and which ones don't work. And they, they usually small, they solve very, very particular niche pains for me. And so I, I, I won't show those, but this is the first app that I would say is, is one that, that is, that had the potential to be something much more agnostic to what, what the profession more broadly. But the other apps that I have are very, are very like I track, for example, my, I have a custom CRM that I use for, for my, just my partnership style. It's not really marketable because most people's, you know the CRM workflows are not, but I do. And also there are many great CRMs on the market. I'm not looking to compete against those products in any way. So this is the first, I would say this is the first app that I've had that had any kind of potential to be useful to others. Yeah. So that's, yeah. And I think that there's a big market for that. Like I think probably the academic space is maybe a little bit underserved, would you say? Yeah, definitely. I would say that. You know, I, yes. There, there's a number of different products that I've seen come out fairly recently that have focused on the writing space, which is really great because there's, there is a, a sort of a lack of that. An app called Latex, for example, another app called Essays, I think is a, is a writing tool. And then there's on the other side of that, there's Bookends, which is an app I love very, very much. It's a Mac Mac first referencing software. And I, I love that that and manuscripts never intended to be a referencing program of any kind, mainly because I love Bookend so much. So I have purposely found this niche space, I think, which is not writing, not referencing software, but sort of in the, in the sort of productivity space within academia, academia tech. Yeah. And it's, and you've had a, you mentioned like your, your, your ideal user of this or the person that you think would see the most value are people that are, that are researchers, that are, that are teaching at that, at colleges, universities and this type of thing, right? Not, not just, I mean, teaching for sure, but more importantly, it would, it's a, it's a tool for tracking your research side of your academic responsibilities. You make a good point that there actually that I, I do have thoughts in my mind of, of one day also making a tool that could help you track your teaching. I'm working on that actually simultaneously in my own space and maybe that will grow into something that, that I could potentially market, but it's that's, that's a separate ballgame is sort of, you know, tracking the, all the things related to your students sort of having a can, I always dream of maybe having a canvas replacement one day for canvases, the program that all profs use really to do grades and teaching schedules and all that. a Mac first version of that would be really amazing. That's not really what manuscripts is. Manuscripts is focused more on, on your research responsibilities as a, as a academic. And I think it doesn't necessarily, you don't necessarily have to be an academic just to, to appreciate this. It could be a staff member, for example, at a research Institute or a scientific organization that is publishing even in industry as well in biotech or other, other sectors that are, have some kind of research component related to, to the work that they do and they publish, then that would be, it would be a useful tool for them. Yeah. I love that. So yeah, so really, really applicable, I think across all, all of academia, because there's just so much research happening. Absolutely. Yeah, totally. And increasingly more so, I mean, that the, the level of effort that goes into a single paper these days has greatly reduced. And the quality of it, I think has improved like overall, hopefully, hopefully. But, but there's still, you know, you can get out more basically now than you ever could before. And that's why manuscripts is a tool that is, is useful for the current moment too, which is that now we are more productive in, in, in researchers, hopefully. We are getting more out of AI and, and being able to research quicker. Doing our background literature reviews are much quicker than they ever used to be. Organizing results are quicker than they ever used to be.

And then the writing process as well from GenAI. So all of that makes us more productive in terms of what we're outputting as researchers. And manuscripts is a way to track all of that output that has been expanded thanks to AI. I love that. Yeah, I mean, output, yeah, output has definitely increased, but then with it, I think, Quality, yeah, but then also you have bugs and this type of thing, right? So I mean, it's a little bit of a, I think, I want to maybe not necessarily backtrack because I do still believe that overall the quality is increasing because there is a, you know, quantity improvement, increasing quantity does eventually reach quality at some point. But I do, I agree with you that actually AI has also independently opened another door to slop, so they say. And so I think there's a potential to have more products available that are less of, that are of less quality. And I think that's where all the more reason why tools should exist that can sort of help us maybe do better in terms of our output. Quant, you know, making the quantity reach the quality. I love that. Yeah, balancing, balancing that, yeah, and trying to mitigate some of the problems that have kind of arised with this kind of increase of productivity. And there, you know, you know, for being in the space, there's no shortage of them, the bugs that arise from moving quickly are a lot. But I wonder whether, you know, it's really just this, as an aside, I'm wondering whether, you know, we have the same problem sort of when we moved, when we had another big tech innovation, you know, Web 2.0, for example, or web, you know, making web development basically more accessible. There's also a lot of bugs that came with that too. So I don't, yes, I think AI is unique in some ways, that it is bringing particular thing going on with the quantity quality debate, but it's also happened before, and I think that's all the more reason for tools like this that do help. Yeah. Yeah, the, there is a lot of, a lot of interesting, every, every kind of huge, I think I've heard, I've read about it in one book, intuition leaps, or these big technological jump-ups, you kind of have like this balancing that happens after that. And then with this new productivity, people need to focus on structure, organizing their things and everything like that, use that time effectively to kind of Keep everything in check. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then you mentioned you're in Vancouver, right? I am, yes. And how long have you been out there? I have been in Vancouver since a number of years, 15 some odd years, but I'm originally from Toronto. Came here to go to school and kind of just stayed. So I'm really, I'm a West Coast person at heart. I think I much more belong, I belong much more on the West Coast than I did back East, but my family is still back East, so I do see them quite often and go home often. Love that. I love that. And then how long have you been in academia? I have been in academia for almost that whole time because I came out to BC to do my masters. So I went from a master's into a PhD. And I, you know, I've taken, I've done non-traditional academic routes, so I took a little bit of breaks in the industry, but let's say on or off for the better part of 15, 17, 15, 16 years. Wow, a long time. So you've written a lot of papers. I have, yeah. I have 80 some odd papers, so it's quite, quite a lot. And this was certainly a, this app was built out of a lot of experience. Let me, let me say that of doing it wrong and doing it right. Yeah, yeah. Most great projects are, I think, come from that, come from that body of work. Yeah, I appreciate very much people who in a way share their tools because it's worked for them. And so now they say, okay, like I've spent a long time refining this, and now I'm happy to share it. And that's the story of manuscripts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Yeah, it kind of tracks, yeah, it follows kind of that journey or that theme, that narrative. And where would you like to see manuscripts continue to grow? What's kind of your vision there? Yeah, good point. I would like to see manuscripts become increasingly more agnostic while not losing its competitive edge tool as a tool. So I want, I don't want it to be complex and cumbersome. I want to keep the simplicity of it, but I also want more people to be able to use it if they will find it to be helpful. So it's, it is right now agnostic to, I'd say any scientific discipline, but there's a lot of people in not in scientific disciplines that could still benefit from a tool like manuscripts that does productivity and version tracking that are in humanities or arts or, you know, not other nonfiction areas. And so I will work with people who wish to uptake the app and wish to give me some feedback. I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about that and how we can just increasingly make it more of a tool that could work for any writer and not just specifically scientific writers. I love that. So yeah, so kind of like broadening out, broadening out the base a little bit and increasing the utility to maybe a wider, a wider audience and people with other expertise, maybe in other types of writing could help you. Exactly. That's right. Yeah. Well, awesome. Yeah. I don't know if there's anything else I also wanted to say other than that. I think the integration piece of it was one thing I wanted to mention is that I have, there's two versions of the app right now. There's a version on Gumroad, which is that I've been able to integrate some of the AI services that are, you know, not, would not be permitted in the App Store. And then there's the App Store version, which is coming. It's not yet up yet, but because I wanted to wait until the new version, I wanted to wait until the next version of Mac OS to make sure if things are working okay before releasing it. But it will use exclusively Foundation, the Foundation models that are built within Mac OS itself. So if you, and I don't know yet what those look like in terms of quality of AI. So currently, if you wish to, you know, if you have an Anthropic key, if you have an OpenAI key or an OpenRouter key, you know, you can use the Gumroad edition, which will get you full feature access. And then eventually, if, you know, for those who are more comfortable with the safety and security of the Mac App Store, there will be a foundation model Mac App Store version that will be coming soon. You're gonna put it on the Mac App Store as well. Yes, yeah. Wow, that's awesome. And then that's, that's a pretty hefty process, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It's a, it's a process for sure. Mainly, um, in that, um, they don't let you use a lot of outside tools. And so the things that I needed to cut were a lot of the AI APIs that currently exist within the settings. You can add your own key. Um, but that will, that had to go away for the Mac App Store. So, um, but other than that, the functionality is very much the same. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, yeah, so you do have some people. I came across a number of people when I first launched the app too that were, um, I don't, I wouldn't say skeptical, but just like, They prefer the security of the Mac App Store. They know it's coming from Apple. They know it's signed by the developer, even though my app on Gumroad direct distribution is also signed. This, they just prefer the Mac App Store. So I'm just offering two different ways to purchase the same product. Yeah. And then I mean, this is consistent with lots of, this is consistent with other developers as well. This is nothing unique. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the, uh, yeah, I think so. I think so too. Like just personally, I prefer to use the Mac App Store, but not, not all. There's a lot of other great tools that are outside of the Mac App Store as well. There are, I agree. And it's just a matter of how, whether you, I don't know, this, this, in a new era of AI coding, I think has made people just a little bit more skeptical, but, um, but yes, there are a lot of great tools that live outside the Mac App Store and that's, they precisely live outside the Mac App Store because they can't sell it in the Mac App Store, which is because they have, um, the features of their app are riskier than the Mac App Store is willing to um to sell, right? Yeah. Yeah, they can be pretty, yeah, Apple can be pretty uh. Yeah, yeah, they do. And in ways I'm kind of glad that they are in some way. I'm just also happy that they offer another route for those who are interested in, and I imagine, imagine the App Store was like for iPhones, like you can only get your apps from that one spot, like people would go nuts if that was um if that was for macOS. Um, so I'm glad that they've offered at least ability to, to get stuff outside of the App Store for Mac. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they, they tend to leave just enough leeway, but also like maintain the integrity of the product

Thanks, Mark. Yeah, that's been great. I'm really pleased. And we'll, we'll stay in touch. And yeah, if anyone wants to reach me, you can reach out, obviously, on the manuscripts-app.com. Yeah, yeah, I'll, I'm gonna, we'll, we'll, we'll post this interview on our website. I'll feature manuscripts as the link on the interview, and then I'll also send you a, I'll, I'll message you, and we can share any social media that you tend to use. Do you use X or LinkedIn or anything like that? I, I, I use LinkedIn. I don't have an X account, but I probably should create one for the app at least. Yeah, yeah, if you want, I can feature you at both of those links on the post. I'll, I'll probably get these posted probably Monday, maybe, maybe later today, but I'll be messaging you on, That sounds great. Thanks again, Mark. All the best. Have a great day. Take care. Bye.

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