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Muse Retrospective


The inside story of four years building Muse, a canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac.

After extensive experiments with iCloud (slow, unreliable, impossible to debug) and Firebase (better but not really suitable for the large data sizes our best customers had) we decided to import another piece of bleeding-edge research technology from Ink & Switch. We envisioned Muse as the perfect combination of the freeform elements of a whiteboard, the structured text-heavy style of Notion or Google Docs, and the sense of place you get from a “virtual office” ala group chat. We had a few quotes from folks describing how their work was forever changed to have this series of nested whiteboards were they could gather ideas, have a shared artifact during a meeting, easily reference older material, sketch together, etc.

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Muse Retrospective