You're trying to do too much & Having a healthy relationship with side-projects

My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 288 👋

It feels good to get back to regularly working on my side-projects. I got back to publishing on my personal blog, updated my personal website, made some updates to Priductive (previously known as Product Privacy, that is one change), and further worked on the Creativerly site and gathered some new ideas for my writing backlog. All those changes happened over the span of a couple of weeks. A year ago, I found myself being stressed out by working on all those different projects. My todo lists became longer and longer, and I did not feel and experience the joy I usually felt.

Whenever I did not progress with any of my side-projects, working on all of them almost simultaneously, I felt bad for taking some down-time. Although I love working on side-projects, I love doing simply nothing, and by that I mean not working on any side-projects and rather embrace the actual down-time.

It was time for some change. As mundane as it may sound, I am now tackling one bit after the other. I am no longer working across tasks spanning from one project to another. I always have a single point of focus, on a single task, and a single project. I also decided to reflect on the whole topic of having a healthy relationship with my side-project and wrote down my thoughts in a blog post published on my personal blog.

Other than that, enjoy this week's newsletter.

Tiny macOS utility apps I love - Part 4

Tiny macOS utility apps I love Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 quickly became three of the most popular posts on Creativerly since the existence of the website. Based on that and the fact that I love writing those kind of posts, gathering lovely small and simple apps, was reason enough to write and work on Part 4. While the previous post (Part 3) had a dedicated focus on simple, minimal, and lightweight note-taking and writing apps, I kept it again more broader in this post.

Read the whole post here:

Tiny macOS utility apps I love – Part 4

Tiny macOS utility apps is back with Part 4. In this post I gathered an app that gathers powerful switches, one that simplifies time tracking, and another one that keeps your Mac awake.

Creativerly •Philipp Temmel

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Fresh Updates & News

Proton moving to a non-profit structure →

Proton just announced that they will move the company towards a non-profit structure. Andy Yen, Proton's founder, Jason Stockman, co-founder, and Dingchao Lu, Proton's first employee, jointly endowed the non-profit Proton Foundation through a donation of Proton shares. With those transfers and commitments from the foundation founders make Proton Foundation the primary shareholder of Proton. This means, proton remains in perpetuity and organization that places people ahead of profits.

Adopting a Swiss non-profit structure provides additional security, as Swiss foundations do not have shareholders, so Proton will no longer be dependent upon the goodwill of any particular person or group of persons. This among other reasons, had been mentioned by Andy Yen in an announcement post on why Proton decided to move to a non-profit structue.

Walling's new leadership →

Ravi Goyal, who has previously co-founded Komodo Health, and worked in leadership roles that spanned across product, data analytics, operations, and strategy, just got announced as Walling's new CEO.

Ahmed Masry, who founded Walling, and turned it from a hobby project into a platform adored by users worldwide, put in time, dedication, and efforts, and led the app through a major restructuring, is stepping down and embarking on a new journey, while continuing to serve Walling as an advisor.

Namecheap introduces increased rates for domains* →

In a recently published blog post, Namecheap informed their customers that because they are partnering with many registries to offer a wide range of top-level domains, those registries occassionally increase their prices, which means Namechea need to increase theirs too.

This means, from September 1, 2024, the .com domain is increasing to $11.28 for the registration (promo price), $11.48 for transfer (promo price), and to $16.88 (standard price) for the renewal or to reactivate a domain. Besides that, .xyz, .monster, .quest, .skin, .homes, and other domains are also going to get a price increase. In case you are thinking of buying a new .com domain, make sure to get it before September 1, 2024 to take advantage of the current price tag. The same applies to registering or transferring your domain.

Mental Wealth

❯ The Tchaikovsky Cure for Worry – “The 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—still popular today for such works as The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture—was not a happy man. In his 5,365 extant letters to friends and family, we find constant references to his sadness and unremitting anxiety. Over and over, he wrote versions of the line: “I suffered incredibly from depression and hatred for the human race.””

❯ Why Is Quitting Social Media So Hard? – “We can’t deny it. Social media is part of our lives, whether we admit it or not. We might say that we are not controlled by the algorithm serving us tailored content. That we are not damaged by the endless stream of stuff swarming our brains. Yet, as you will find below, there is hardly anyone who can confidently state that their mental health is not, in some way, bruised by these life-sucking channels.”

❯ How To Defend Your Design Process – “Maybe you’ve been there before: You’re in the middle of the design process, and stakeholders expect you to deliver faster. How do you best manage a situation like this? How do you communicate the design process and defend it when stakeholders think the design is taking too long?”

❯ You’re Trying to Do Too Much – “We tend to add things, even when subtracting is both logically equivalent and more practically useful. We want to get in shape, so we add exercise to our schedule. We want to succeed at a project at work, so we add it to our to-do list. We want to learn more, so we stack up more books.”

Do not miss out on this ...

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These are paid promotions or affiliate links to support Creativerly. If you are interested in putting your tool, product, or resource in front of over 2000 creative minds, consider advertising in Creativerly and book a sponsor or classified ad spot. Find all the important information at creativerly.com/advertise.

Appendix

❯ ICYMI

Framer and Webflow became the leading tools when it comes to visual development. However, there is a new contender, it is open-source, powerful, feature-rich, and offering a lot of flexibility. It is called Webstudio, and I recently wrote a deep dive about it, exploring its features and capabilities. Check it out.

❯ Quick Bits

• AMD signs $4.9 billion deal to challenge Nvidia’s AI infrastructure lead
• Procreate defies AI trend, pledges “no generative AI” in its illustration app
• CEO of failing hospital chain got $250M amid patient deaths, layoffs, bankruptcy
• “Disappointing”: Sonos CEO says old, user-preferred app can’t be re-released
• Ars Technica content is now available in OpenAI services
• Google can’t defend shady Chrome data hoarding as “browser agnostic,” court says
• ‘Threads is just deathly dull’: have Twitter quitters found what they are looking for on other networks?
• OpenAI signs multi-year content partnership with Condé Nast
• About 500,000 trees cut down at site of Tesla gigafactory near Berlin
• Meta, Spotify CEOs slap down European officials for ‘stifling’ AI innovation
• Under pressure from Europe, Apple makes iOS browser options bit more reasonable
• French authorities arrest Telegram’s CEO
• OpenAI exec says California’s AI safety bill might slow progress

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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