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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. This week's newsletter is sponsored by Griff Foxley, coaching creatives and entrepreneurs towards holistic success.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 292 👋I keep this intro section of the newsletter as short as possible, because this week, we have a packed one. A new long-form post about a topic that accompanies me for quite some time, fresh news and updates about apps, insightful articles, and interesting quick bits. I had a lot to share this week. At a certain point I asked myself if the newsletter would be too long, however I always focus on delivering valuable information. Everything I put into the newsletter got me excited and therefore I want to share it with you too. Now, have fun and enjoy this week's issue of Creativerly.
Team messaging is broken Remote work became quite a standard. Although huge companies like Amazon are now forcing their employees back into the office, I still have the feeling that a majority of employers and employees appreciate the benefits of remote work. They realized how unnecessary and unproductive it is to plaster everyone’s calendar with meetings that could have been an email, or a asynchronous discussion within a team messenger app. People want to work. However, they also want to have control over their own time, and remote, and especially async remote work is the perfect setting for it. While there are fewer remote job listings these days, they still receive far more interest and applications compared to onsite ones. Remote work peaked during the pandemic, a lot of people suddenly found themselves working remotely, and setting up a home office. However, we are now settling for a new normal. Therefore, remote work is not going anywhere, it is here to stay. A lot of companies are settling for hybrid work, having people onsite and spread across the whole world. In that scenario, nailing team messaging and work communication is as important as ever. In contrary to that, most companies and teams default to the big players, Slack and Microsoft Teams, the two team messaging and collaboration apps that feel overwhelming, bloated, and distracting. Effective team communication needs clear communication channels, which are designated platforms just like team messaging services, among other tools. What most of those services and apps got wrong is that they transformed in-person communication to a digital tool, so they decided it has to be instant, with a lot of notifications, in your face, so your work and your focus gets disrupted. Instead, people should embrace the idea that not all communication needs to be immediate. If you learn to structure and organize your work, you do not have to rely on the answer of one your colleagues whenever you post a question, since you can park that project and work on something else in the meantime. I do not say that all communication has to be async, there are a lot of situations in which direct and immediate communication is the better choice, probably needed. But a lot of day-to-day communication at work would work and even benefit from async communication. Read the whole post here:
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Fresh Updates & NewsBear, the most beautiful, calm, and powerful markdown writing app, is back with yet another lovely app update. Bear 2.3 introduces the highly requested multi-color highlighter feature, which gives you the possibility to choose from five dynamic color (Green, Red, Blue, Yellow, Purple). Besides that, Bear fully supports iOS 18's new Tinted Color Icons, and it further integrates with the newest version of the iPhone OS, as Bear now offers quick access to core features with the brand-new Control Center widgets. To get a full glimpse into this release, make sure to head over to the blog post linked above. Setapp Mobile open beta is here. All users located in the EU can now try an alternative app marketplace to get apps for their iPhones. Setapp mobile provides a beautiful user interface and is already packed with hand-picked apps that empower you to make your life simple. To get access to Setapp Mobile it just needs a single subscription that covers all the apps. No hidden fees or in-app purchases. As of writing this, Setapp Mobile gives you access to CleanMyPhone, ClearVPN, BusyCal, SideNotes, Taskheat, Expenses, and a lot more powerful apps. Linear quickly became one of the most popular tools when it comes to planning and building products. The times of struggling in and getting annoyed by bloated software like Jira are over as Linear introduced the system for modern software development, that allows you to streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. With the newly introduced mobile apps, available for iOS and Android, you get the portable companion to the Linear system. Linear Mobile is built natively with Swift and Kotlin code to guarantee a fast and fluid user interface. The user interface has been redesigned from the ground up, so you can enjoy a lightweight experience. While Linear has raised the standards for modern software design for its desktop experience already, it now did the same for its mobile apps. You can download the mobile apps for iOS and Android right away. Noor is a team messaging and collaboration app that features infinite threads, backlinks to threads, rich previews for Linear, Figma, Notion, and more, a dedicated inbox, multiplayer screen-share, and a lot more. The app has been available for little over a year now, and you can download apps for macOS and iOS (beta), while a web app is also available. However, the co-founders Mo Rajabi and Deni Sohrabi announced that they have been working on another messaging app for teams called Inline, which will be open for early access starting in October 2024. According to some lose information I stumbled across online, Noor will continue to operate and receive further updates, which means Mo Rajabi and Deni Sohrabi will simultaneously work on two products from the same field. It will be interesting to see how long both products will operate simultaneously. Noor is an incredible polished product, which gets me excited about Inline as well. Back in February 2023, Shihab Mehboob, a iOS developer known for apps like Vinyls or Aviary (rip), sold the Mastodon client Mammoth, which then received a pre-seed funding round led by Mozilla. As it has been more than a year since he sold Mammoth, he started working on a new Mastodon client called Saturn, which is available now. It is yet again a feature-rich and beautifully-design app to browse and read through the fediverse. A unique feature of Saturn that stands out among the other Mastodon clients is Highlights. With Highlights, you get a summary of your timeline and it shows you popular content. That feature does not leverage AI or machine learning, but it rather is powered by a simple native checker that looks to see which posts and accounts from the user's timeline are seeing the highest engagement in the app. Saturn is available for iOS (with a dedicated focus on iOS 18). You can download the app for free, however, it offers in-app purchases to get full access to all its features. Readymag has been a website builder pushing the limits of web design for quite some time now. Initially, it was built as a design tool for zines, but shortly after its launch, it transformed into a powerful creative tool to build modern websites, landing pages, portfolios, and anything online. With Design Layers the team behind Readymag created a free online conference happening on October 5th featuring five speakers who are delivering talks, product demos, and Q&As. The five speakers are Verònica Fuerte (Founder and Creative Directress of Hey Studio), Abb-D Taiyo (Co-founder of Driftime), Yah-Leng Yu (Founding Partner and Creative Director of Foreign Policy Design), Samar Maakrouni (Partner at Pentagram), and Cat How (Founder, CEO, and Exec. Creative Director of How&How). You can register via the Design Layers website for free.
Mental Wealth❯ Mastering our mind for better ideas – “Whether we like it or not, the digital noise we absorb everyday (yep, the doomscrolling, the media overload, and the speed at which we’re expected to live) affect our thinking. Constant engagement and relentless “productivity” doesn't just clutter our minds; it has a profound impact on our ability to think critically and come up with original ideas. The good news is: we can step outside the infinite scroll and reclaim our capacity to think creatively. We can ignore the endless open tabs for a second, to regain clarity of thought.” ❯ I’m a Therapist Who Procrastinates—Here’s How I Get Unstuck – “Quick, what are you procrastinating on right now? For a lot of us—cough, me—the answer might be, “Uh, what am I not procrastinating on?” It’s common to put off your responsibilities, whether that’s an innocuous task on your to-do list or making a huge life change. Heck, you probably even drag your feet on doing things you know you’d enjoy. If you don’t, at least occasionally, you might be the odd one out, Britt Frank, LSCSW, a therapist based in Kansas City, Kansas, tells SELF.” ❯ Eight Ways to Banish Misery – “To achieve greater well-being, you have two tasks. The first is to increase your level of happiness; the second is to manage your unhappiness. To know which side of the ledger to start on, some self-evaluation can be useful. One tool to help with that is known as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) test, which rates your natural levels of happy and unhappy affect—or, in lay terms, mood—compared with those of other people. In my teaching and writing, I have found PANAS to be one of the most useful and reliable tests for self-understanding, because it separates your total well-being into discrete emotional channels.” ❯ The Foundation for Success and Happiness are the Same – “I recently listened to Dr. Tim Sharp’s Habits for Happiness on audiobook. Sharp, a psychologist who often goes by the nickname “Dr. Happy,” offers some useful advice on how to be happier. While Sharp’s advice was sensible to me, it struck me as interesting that if the book had been called “Habits for Success” or “Habits for Achievement” the list wouldn’t have differed very much. Imagining your best possible self, setting clear goals, exercising regularly and getting enough sleep matter to both achievement and well-being.”
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Appendix❯ ICYMI Looking for an app that gathers powerful switches, one that simplifies time tracking, and another one that keeps your Mac awake? Check out part 4 of Tiny macOS utility apps I love, in which I wrote about One Switch, Daily, and Caffeine. ❯ Quick Bits
Thank you to the sponsor of this issue, Griff Foxley, coaching creatives and entrepreneurs towards holistic success. Till next time! 👋 Support: Do you have a friend who is looking for inspiration, news about design, and useful tools and apps? Forward this newsletter to a friend or simply share this issue and show some support. You can also show some love by simply clicking the button down below and keep this newsletter a sustainable side-project by buying me a coffee. ☕️ 🥰
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