Miro creates an infinitely zoomable canvas for real-time or asynchronous teamwork. It’s like a whiteboard but with a ton of creative and collaborative features built in.

This little app moves your help desk into Slack: “Twitter mentions, DMs and incoming emails to your connected email get delivered to your preferred Slack channel. Review with your team and reply once ready.”

Fascinating and a bit wild to think that this is possible with any iPhone: Hawkeye Access for iOS or MacOS lets you navigate your mobile device or computer with just your eyes and some simple facial expressions. Watch the demo.

Although it’s been around since 2005, up until last week I had never heard of LibraryThing, a free community for book lovers. A welcome alternative if you’re tired of Goodreads or just want to get away from Amazon’s ever-expanding tentacles.

How Design Makes the World →

Good design for everyone

A new book by Scott Berkun, released just a couple of weeks ago: “Everything we use, from our homes to our smartphones, from highways to hammers, was designed by someone. How did they decide what was good for the rest of us? What did they get right and where have they let us down? And what can we learn from the way these experts think that can help us make decisions in our own lives?”

Terraplanter →

Soilless planter

If it works as promised, this is a wonderful low-tech product that’s just beautiful to look at: through a porous material the terraplanter diffuses water to the roots of the plant on the outside, requiring no soil. All you need to do (according the Kickstarter page) is to rub spores on it, cover it in seeds or attach an existing plant, then fill it with water and watch it grow.

The pandemic has been a boon for Big Tech and they’re now lobbying harder than ever to replace essential public services. “Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future.”

I like Thom Wong’s idea of ‘passive income for the soul’ from his newsletter (which is worth subscribing to): “Soul-based passive income is when something you do requires little to no effort but delivers a lot of satisfaction.”

Jacinda Ardern, Angela Merkel, Nicola Sturgeon – it’s tempting to reach the conclusion that women must be better at dealing with this crisis because of their gender but there simply isn’t a big enough sample group to make that assumption. Helen Lewis writes for The Atlantic: “Let’s not flip the old sexist script. After centuries of dogma that men are naturally better suited to leadership, the opposite is not suddenly true. Women leaders aren’t the cause of better government. They are a symptom of it.”