Muse — tool for thought
A very different kind of notes
Free (IAPs) From Muse Software, museapp.com Made for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch Needs iOS 13.0 or later
Muse isn’t like other note–taking iPad apps. Its makers call it a “spatial canvas” and it’s designed to work rather like stacks of material sitting on your desk. You can collate text, images, screenshots, bookmarks and other content in a single space and move it around to make connections and uncover what you need when you need it. The developers describe it as enabling you to “move
continuously through your entire knowledge garden,” which is a terrible phrase that we never want to hear again!
Muse’s equivalent of a blank canvas is a “board.” You can add content to a board from pretty much anywhere: Safari, Mail, Twitter, Slack, Files, Photos, cloud storage services such as Dropbox, or anywhere else where there’s information you want to use. And you can embed boards within boards for ever more granular detail, which is useful for big projects.
It’s easy to get content into Muse. Let’s say you’re planning a construction project in the city: you might want to include plans, screenshots from maps, concept art, financial data, and documents. With Muse you can pull them all in from disparate sources and organize them in
whichever way makes most sense to you. You can then supplement your content with text boxes, and the app’s Apple Pencil support means you can illustrate and annotate too. You can draw on anything anywhere, although if you subsequently move the item’s small version to a different location on your board your illustration or annotation will stay where it is.
The content you put on your board can be moved and resized, and it’s zoomable. For example, if you include a PDF in your board you can see it and move it as a thumbnail and tap on it to read the whole thing. Your finished board can then be exported in Muse format to share with other app users or as a PDF. PDF exports the board as a flat document and Muse format retains the embedding so that the other user can open the content in the board.
What Muse is trying to do here is unite a disparate array of apps: freeform note–taking, digital sketching, mind mapping, and document storage and retrieval. Whether that works really depends on the way you like to think and organize information. An app such as DEVONthink may well be better for organizing and retrieving large amounts of data, while Concepts or a similar infinite canvas may be better for scribbling thoughts and connecting ideas. We’d also recommend taking a look at the award–winning LiquidText, which has been around for a few years now and which is available for desktop as well as tablet use.
You don’t need to make an immediate decision on which app suits you best, though: Muse enables you to experiment with what it can do and you can use 100 items before you need to sign up for a subscription ($99.99/year).
THE BOTTOM LINE. Muse is an unusual, interesting and innovative way for users to collate, connect and present all kinds of information. CARRIE MARSHALL