Installing Muse: your first five minutes

Installing Muse is the easy part, and it should stay that way. Download a file, drag an icon into Applications, open it. The part worth planning for is what the app looks like the moment it opens with nothing in it yet, because an empty library is exactly the moment most new apps get closed and forgotten.

This walks through the real five minutes: what your Mac needs before you download anything, what installing and opening Muse actually looks like, and the one thing worth doing first so the library has something in it from the start.

What does your Mac need to run Muse?

Worth checking before you download rather than after. Muse needs an Apple Silicon Mac, an M1, M2, M3 or M4 machine, running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. There is no Intel build, and an older or unsupported Mac will simply not open it. If you are not sure which chip your Mac has, click the Apple menu in the top left corner and choose About This Mac. It shows both the chip and the macOS version on one screen, so you can check in a few seconds rather than finding out after the download finishes.

How do you actually install it?

Installation is a single drag, the same as almost every Mac app that does not come from the App Store.

1. Download Muse from theodorehq.com/muse. The download is a disk image, a file ending in .dmg.
2. Open the downloaded file. A window appears showing the Muse icon next to an alias of your Applications folder.
3. Drag the Muse icon onto the Applications alias. This copies the app across. Nothing else needs choosing.
4. Open Muse from Applications or Launchpad. You can eject the disk image afterward, or leave it sitting there; it does nothing once the copy is finished.

What happens when you open it for the first time?

The first launch comes with one small extra step. Because Muse is downloaded directly rather than through the Mac App Store, macOS checks it once before opening it, and shows a dialog saying Muse is an app downloaded from the Internet and asking whether you are sure you want to open it. Click Open. That is the whole step. You should not see a warning about an unidentified developer, because Muse is signed and notarised by Apple, which means Apple has already scanned the build and confirmed who published it. Apple explains what these checks do in its guide to safely opening apps on your Mac. If you ever do meet a harder warning, that is a sign the download did not finish cleanly, so fetch it again rather than working around it.

After that, Muse opens into a short first-run walkthrough that points out where the shortcuts live and offers to bring something in from wherever you already keep it. Skip it if you would rather explore on your own; none of it is required. From the moment the app opens, the 30-day trial has started, with every feature unlocked and no card needed to begin.

What should you actually do in the first five minutes?

This is the part that decides whether Muse sticks. A brand new library is an empty grid, and an empty grid tells you nothing about whether the app is any good. The fastest way past that is to bring in something you already have, rather than starting from a save or two and hoping the rest follows.

Your browser bookmarks are usually the quickest option, since almost everyone has some and getting them out takes under a minute in any browser. Muse reads the exported bookmarks file, rebuilds your folders as collections, and fetches a preview image for each link as it comes in, so a list of blue links turns into something you can actually recognise on sight. There is a full walkthrough on moving your bookmarks out of Chrome if you want the exact steps for your browser.

If you already used Eagle, Raindrop or Pinterest, those import straight from their own library or export format too. Whichever source you pick, the goal is the same: get the library past empty in the first sitting, so the next time you open Muse there is already something to search, scroll through, or drop a new item next to.

What happens after the 30-day trial ends?

Worth knowing now rather than finding out on day thirty. Muse's trial is not a taste of a limited version; it is the full app for 30 days. When the trial ends, though, the whole app locks rather than dropping into a read-only or reduced mode. Capturing, editing and organising all stop until you buy a licence. Your library itself is untouched and nothing is deleted, and Export My Library stays available from the buy screen so you can write every collection back out as ordinary folders whenever you want, trial or not. Buying simply picks up the exact same library where the lock left it.