Each platform has its own purpose and cues unique moods and ways of working.<ul><li>A phone is great for quick capture on the go, but isn’t a place to sit down and work out a complex spreadsheet.</li><li>A laptop or desktop is great for heavy authoring tasks, but doesn’t offer good ergonomics for lengthy reading.</li><li>And tablets are ideal for sitting back in your armchair to read and reflect.</li></ul>

Platform purpose

Muse was designed to be more than a single app, but a suite of tools optimized for different modes of deep work across your devices.<ul><li>Muse for iPad — relaxed thinking, annotating, and brainstorming. Takes advantage of the intimacy of the touchscreen, the immediacy of the high-performance display, and the fun of working with your hands.</li><li>Muse for Mac — productivity, heavy research, bulk editing. Takes advantage of more screen real estate, the keyboard, file system, and overlapping windows.</li><li>Muse for iPhone — Quick capture on the go</li><li>Muse browser extension — Save URLs and snippets from the web</li></ul>

Platform design choices for Muse

<h3>Phone</h3><UL><LI>capture as quickly as possible so that you can record a note in the middle of conversation without being taken out of the moment</LI></UL><h2>Why native apps</h2>Muse for iPad and Mac are lovingly built as native apps. This means they run lighting fast and keep a copy of all your work locally. Though we love the web for many reasons, web technology cannot currently offer the fast, fluid, hardware-integrated experience that Muse wants to deliver to you.Native also gives the benefit of greater system integration. Drag-and-drop, for example, is a crucial interaction for Muse where you’re often clipping content from other apps into a board, or taking finished boards and pulling out content into your authoring tool. Electron apps, for example, often struggle to offer reasonable drag-and-drop functionality.And lastly it’s not just about technology: it’s about how the app feels, and whether it is a good citizen of the platform. On Mac, for example, there are many standards for menus, toolbars, window titles, and more. Wherever possible we strive to make sure Muse feels completely at home on the platform it’s running on.<h2>Local-first sync</h2>It’s not enough to have Muse running on each of your devices; but also you need to access your work seamlessly across them. That implies sync.A traditional cloud solution would be antithetical to our values of fast, intimate, and in your control. Hence we need sync that preserves the autonomy of your individual devices and gives you ownership of your data, while still connecting them together effortlessly.Conveniently and not coincidentally, two of the Muse partners are coauthors of the essay Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud. This widely-cited academic paper summarizes a decade of work on a technology that has the promise to give users the benefits of the cloud (device syncing and multi-user collaboration) while also keeping data local for speed, offline capability, and greater agency over your work.<h2>A medium for thought</h2>We want Muse to be not just an app for one platform, but a tool for thinking that is available everywhere that is a part of your thinking process. And to connect it all together such that you can switch between them seamlessly.Given this vision, perhaps tool is not even the right term. As Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (quoting Alan Kay) write:<BLOCKQUOTE>What’s more, the term “tool” implies a certain narrowness. […] A medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.</BLOCKQUOTE>We believe that a Muse which spans all your devices has the potential to be this type of immersive context. And thereby to expand the breadth and depth of your creativity, your problem-solving ability, and your ideas.

Muse is a good example of a product that honors the platform on which it's running

creativity

Creativity

product

Product & Design

<ul><li>capture as quickly as possible so that you can record a note in the middle of conversation without being taken out of the moment </li> </ul>

Muse for iPad and Mac are lovingly built as native apps. This means they run lighting fast and keep a copy of all your work locally. Though we love the web for many reasons, web technology cannot currently offer the fast, fluid, hardware-integrated experience that Muse wants to deliver to you.

Native also gives the benefit of greater system integration. Drag-and-drop, for example, is a crucial interaction for Muse where you’re often clipping content from other apps into a board, or taking finished boards and pulling out content into your authoring tool. Electron apps, for example, often struggle to offer reasonable drag-and-drop functionality.

And lastly it’s not just about technology: it’s about how the app feels, and whether it is a good citizen of the platform. On Mac, for example, there are many standards for menus, toolbars, window titles, and more. Wherever possible we strive to make sure Muse feels completely at home on the platform it’s running on.

It’s not enough to have Muse running on each of your devices; but also you need to access your work seamlessly across them. That implies sync.

A traditional cloud solution would be antithetical to our values of fast, intimate, and in your control. Hence we need sync that preserves the autonomy of your individual devices and gives you ownership of your data, while still connecting them together effortlessly.

Conveniently and not coincidentally, two of the Muse partners are coauthors of the essay Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud. This widely-cited academic paper summarizes a decade of work on a technology that has the promise to give users the benefits of the cloud (device syncing and multi-user collaboration) while also keeping data local for speed, offline capability, and greater agency over your work.

We want Muse to be not just an app for one platform, but a tool for thinking that is available everywhere that is a part of your thinking process. And to connect it all together such that you can switch between them seamlessly.

Given this vision, perhaps tool is not even the right term. As Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (quoting Alan Kay) write:

What’s more, the term “tool” implies a certain narrowness. […] A medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.

We believe that a Muse which spans all your devices has the potential to be this type of immersive context. And thereby to expand the breadth and depth of your creativity, your problem-solving ability, and your ideas.

Designing for Each Device

Platform purpose

Platform design choices for Muse

Ovidiu Podariu's ideas are part of this journey:

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