APP LIFE

THIS MONTH’S MOST INTERESTING iPHONE & iPAD APPS

- CARRIE MARSHALL

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.