Muse
p/muse-3
Inspired & focused thinking
Adam Wiggins
Muse — Turn your iPad into a tool for thought.
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How do you research and think through important decisions? Open browser tabs, files in Dropbox, a whiteboard… Muse offers a new way. It turns your iPad into a spatial canvas for research notes, PDFs, screenshots, sketches, and bookmarks.
Replies
Chris Carella
This is an amazingly great product. I have been in the beta for months and subscribed to the product in the first week of use. I'm an iPad first user and Muse reminds me of how the iPad should have always worked. As I've gone through a personal productivity theme for 2020, Muse has become the cornerstone of my practice. I use it for my bullet journal, I use it for my slipbox, my mood boards, my pdf research tool, my whiteboard, my sketch book and sketch notes & anything else I can imagine. In a year when a lot of people went crazy over organizing their information via mouse and keyboard (Notion/Roam), I find it incredibly refreshing to get all the benefits of a digital tool, while manipulating the information with my hands as if I'm using pen, paper and an infinitely large desk. A final note that every interaction and animation in the app is incredibly thoughtful & I believe best in class for an iPad Pro Pencil experience.
Adam Wiggins
@ccarella Wow thank you Chris 😊 You speak to just why we think a tool like this should exist. We'll be working hard to make Muse even better for you in the future.
Boris Mann
Congrats @hirodusk and the entire Muse team! I'm a paid member -- because I want products like this to exist. I think back fondly to Omnigraffle and similar pro Mac tools. Since I do a lot of sourcing on my phone, the "share mode" available on the iPhone app works well for me. I can sit down and process and think about what I've gathered. I also love the focus on files, and I'm looking forward to experimenting with Muse bundles in interesting ways.
Adam Wiggins
@bmann Thanks for your support Boris! I think we share a love of classic unix-style files, as well as a passion for modernizing them for a cloud+mobile world.
Chris Kluis
This product is insane. It's a butter smooth and beautiful to use. Lots of potential for the future. Easiest $100 software decision I've ever made.
Adam Wiggins
@ckluis ❤️
Jan König
This is pretty cool! Reminds me of https://darkblueheaven.com/spati... I'm a heavy Notion and Roam user and like how Muse focuses more on unstructured content and scribbling. Would be great to find a way to turn Muse "scribbles" into structured content, too. Any plans for adding something like a "backlink" functionality that many of the current tools are introducing to structure knowledge? Or would that go against your use case?
Adam Wiggins
@einkoenig Great article, thanks Jan. I think we're at the start of an interesting time for spatial interfaces: Figma is one example, but check out the innovative work being done by The Browser Company or MakeSpace as two great examples.
Adam Wiggins
@einkoenig Regarding general-purpose linking, including backlinks (as pioneered by tools-for-thought juggernaut Roam): this is absolutely a fit for Muse. We have a design for this already, and you can even see a glimpse of it today in the Source Peek feature (check out the handbook for a video).
Long Qu
@einkoenig @hirodusk any updates / roadmap plans for bidirectional linking? :) as a heavily obsidian.my user, but visual thinker, that would be so awesome! 🥳
Adam Wiggins
@einkoenig @long_qu Still on the roadmap but hasn't quite bubbled to the top yet. Soon, I hope :-)
Mark Whiting
I've been testing Muse for a little less than a year and I have to say its probably the best piece of iPad software I've encountered — the attention to detail in the design and execution is phenomenal. Muse enables in-flow thinking that I think is rarely achieved in computer mediated work and feels a lot more like working through notes and ideas on a desk.
Adam Wiggins
@markwhiting "in-flow thinking" -> great turn of phrase. Really appreciate all your support through the beta period, it was pretty rough around the edges when you got started!
Jeffrey Wyman
excellent demo.
Adam Wiggins
Hey Product Hunt 👋🏼 Muse began life in a research lab called Ink & Switch, where my colleagues and I were researching the future of computing for creativity and productivity. We dug into the question of whether a touchscreen interface can be a fast, powerful tool for serious work. Muse spun out of the lab as a commercial product last summer, then spent a year in beta. Now it's ready for you to try out! 🚀 A founding insight for Muse is that deep thinking happens away from the computer. That could be in a paper sketchbook, on a whiteboard, or just in your head. There are some up-and-coming tools for thought like Notion and Roam but they’re for desktop/laptop computers and primarily focused on text. We saw an opportunity for a thinking tool that blends together visual media, text, spatial navigation all made for the iPad and Pencil. We’re charging $100/year, comparable to other prosumer tools like Dropbox. You can try for free as long as you want and export all your data in PDF/PNG/TXT files at any time. We're a small team (five people) and trying to build the business on customer revenue instead of VC funding. Download on your iPad: https://museapp.com/download Follow development on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MuseAppHQ Listen to Mark and I talk shop on our podcast: https://museapp.com/podcast Delighted to answer your questions in the comments here. ❤️
oliverw
I’ve been using this for a few months now and I’m really enjoying the thoughtful interaction design and the way it can aggregate a whole range of content types into one canvas.
Adam Wiggins
@oliverw Much appreciated Oliver. Agreed that content types is key—whereas there are many great iPad apps for drawing+sketching, and many great apps for primarily text-based notes, Muse tries to put images, text, sketches, PDFs, and even video and tweets on equal footing.
David Dollar
Congratulations on the launch! Ever since the release of the original iPad I've periodically tried to get it to fill this role in my life. Unfortunately, it's never really worked out. During idea generation I'm usually either out on a walk, where the only tools available are my brain and a small notepad, or at a computer with its powerful suite of organization and research tools. I've not yet found any tools on the iPad that have proven valuable enough to lug around the technology. Given the talent and thoughtfulness of the folks involved with Muse I'm excited to give it a shot. I'm curious about the opportunity for collaboration with Muse. With more and more folks working remotely these days the need for a "virtual whiteboard" seems greater than ever. Can you manipulate the same content live with other users?
Adam Wiggins
@ddollar Thanks, and for sure the "small notebook that can slip into a pocket or bag" is a classic tool for thought that will never go out of style. For me, switching over to an iPad lifestyle has been a mix of great apps inherited from the iPhone (Ulysses and Google Docs for writing, Pocket for long-form reading, and the usual Slack/Twitter/etc); the ability to do some (but not all) desktop tasks including dev stuff via Blink (ssh), and then this thinking-tool case which includes stuff like PDF annotation and sketching. Throw in an always-on internet connection with the SIM card in my iPad and it's 75% of what I want a laptop for, 50% of what I want a phone for, and 300% of what I want a sketchbook or whiteboard for. On collaboration, we explicitly chose to start with a single-user experience. Thinking is inherently a private activity that starts with a single person. But beyond that initial private activity, then you want to share your thoughts with a small set of colleagues, perhaps the equivalent of Gist/Cloudapp/Dataclips or a live whiteboard session like you mentioned. On the roadmap :-)
Aakarshna Anand
Looks amazing and super resourceful, can't wait to try this product on my iPad :)
Leander Kouparanis
This app is so well-designed, it's the only app the makes me consider to an apple product recently. Hope to see it on other devices soon.
Kaylee Lieffers
Cool!
Michael The Geek 
Hope to see a Mac version.
Norbert Schnöde
100$? way too expensive for what it does.
Adam Wiggins
@noscho Hi Norbert, fair criticism. Curious how you think it compares to other prosumer tools like Dropbox ($120/year), Roam ($165/year), or Evernote ($95/year).
Norbert Schnöde
@hirodusk Dropbox is a very mighty tool with numerous features. Evernote is a giant with hundreds of features. In this comparison Muse is a one trick pony. Not worth a 100 bucks a year. Yet.
Nicolo S
@noscho @hirodusk I think the price is right but the fact that it’s annual billing can make it off-putting for some people. I would personally prefer 9-10$ a month or something. I’ve been trying muse for a couple of months now and it really is a great polished piece of software! Is there a file storage limit?
Adam Wiggins
@noscho @coconidodev Yes all fair points. We hope to add monthly billing as well as perhaps a student/aspiring-professional tier to make it more approachable price-wise. Since we're still in early days, you might think of buying a membership as a bit like supporting our Kickstarter or Steam Early Access. You're not paying for what the app is today, but what it can become over the coming 12 months.
Adam Wiggins
@noscho @coconidodev The free trial is limited to 100 cards, which will get you pretty far. After that you're only limited by the storage on your iPad.
David Bradford
Looks amazing and to me, the bility to bring in notes, images, pdfs etc and ink ANYWHERE without being constrained to specific zones/rules, is what the iPad should have offered from the outset of the Apple Pencil introduction
Dan Peterson
This is truly brilliant! It's really well done and I love it so far. A few notes: - I see my inbox data in iCloud but what about everything else? Where in the filesystem can I access my data? Data ownership and portability are paramount for professional work. - Will portrait be supported? It's sort of strange that it's not right now. - Additionally do you plan to allow the work space to be extended in any direction? - Pencil tools are a bit limited. Of particular interest would be the ability to auto-correct shapes like you see in traditional note-taking apps. - Omnigraffle style stencils could be interesting. I have no problem with the price. I think it's fair. However I'm hesitant to jump on board without knowing that I can access the underlying data in some kind of portable format.
Adam Wiggins
@dan_peterson3 Hi Dan, thanks for that. Answers to your questions: • Data is stored locally on the device only right now, but for data portability I recommend trying Export → Muse bundle. That will produce a file that you can rename to .ZIP and open up to access all your data in standard formats (TXT, PNG, etc). Much more coming on this front in the future. • True portrait support is part of a larger feature we're releasing very soon, here's a sneak peek: https://twitter.com/MuseAppHQ/st... • Shapes and other cool inking tools also on the roadmap :-)