Notes on taste and keeping things
Building Muse,A Place For WhatInspires Me
- Platform
- iOS + macOS
- Built with
- SwiftUI
- Design & Build
- Ryan Lugg
Most of the images I save lived in two places, mymind and Pinterest. Neither one felt like mine.
So I built Muse, a mood board app for iPhone, iPad and Mac. It started out as Tasteboard. The tagline is the whole brief: collect what inspires you.
It sits somewhere between mymind and Atlas. Save an image, let the app file it, and come back to it later.
This is a short note on what it does and how it came together.
01Getting my stuff in
The first thing I built was import. I brought my mymind and Pinterest images into Muse, so it was useful from the start instead of an empty grid waiting to be filled.
New saves come in from X and Pinterest directly. I don't screenshot something and upload it again by hand.
Import came before everything else for a simple reason. If moving my library over had been painful, I would have gone back to the old apps, however good the rest of Muse was.
02Letting the device do the filing
I don't want to name or tag anything at the moment I save it. Muse uses on-device Apple Intelligence to write a title and a set of tags for each image. That step runs on the device, and it means search works without me doing any filing.
The titles are not perfect, and they don't need to be. They only have to be good enough that typing a word I half remember brings the image back.
03Rediscover
A board you never look at again is just storage. Rediscover shows old saves one at a time. Swipe to keep one. Swipe the other way and it disintegrates off the screen.
It is a quick way to prune, and it makes going back through old saves feel like part of the app rather than a chore.
04Home screen and iPad
The widgets put a few saves on the home screen in a Pinterest-style grid, on dark squircle cards. I see the board without opening the app.
On iPad, Muse has its own landscape layout, so the extra width becomes more grid instead of a stretched phone screen.
05The look
The palette is short: a blue (#2563FF), a coral (#FF5A45), a near-black (#0B0B0F) and an off-white (#F7F7F8). The images bring the colour, and the interface stays out of the way.
Muse is the app I wanted from mymind and Pinterest, in one place I control. There is more at ryanlugg.com/muse.