Muse: Not just a whiteboard, it’s a tool for thought

The past few months have been an exciting transition for me – I recently joined the team at Muse building a sense-making-more-than-a-whiteboard-deep-thinking iPad app.

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Muse is a working set of your thoughts – it sits right between your short term memory and your long term memory: it’s your working memory. It helps you make sense of things that just don’t quite make sense. It’s a whiteboard with ink, but also images, text, PDFs, and files, and more. It’s a canvas that expands with your thoughts. It’s nested boards-within-boards because some thoughts need a bit more space to grow.

Years ago I worked on Loose Leaf, a simple paper metaphor on the iPad for notes and pictures, but in so many ways Muse has exceeded my initial ambitions, and I couldn’t be more excited to join their team and contribute to the shared vision.

The chrome of Muse is entirely minimal, and the majority of functionality can be accessed by a few quickly learned gestures. What really sets Muse apart is how powerful these few gestures can be when used together, the videos below are just a small sampling of the Muse Handbook, and show how this simplicity keeps disruptive context changes at bay while you work.

The epiphany, the moment you’ll think ‘wait, why doesn’t every app do this?!’ The eraser – just put a finger down on the screen and erase – no extra tool, no context switching – just erase!
The eraser isn’t the only quick-use with a finger down on the screen. Place two fingers on the screen to select ink and move. Simple gestures that keep you in the flow of thought.
And you can excerpt an image just as easily as moving ink. All of this possible with fewer gestures than can be counted on one hand, simplicity at its finest.
It’s tactile, it’s simple. The few simple gestures are so satisfying to use together.

Muse is far and away the most exciting product I’ve worked on in the course of my career, and we’re just getting started. Muse is a tool-for-thought that allows truly immersive deep work.

Visit museapp.com, sign up for a sneak peek, and then download the app before our official launch later this month.

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