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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 mymind, one private place to keep your images, bookmarks, screenshots, articles, notes and videos. Save it with a click and it’s all organized for you. Find it later with a simple search.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 297 👋As I am still enjoying some time off, this week does not bring a new long-form post, however I still managed to prepare a packed newsletter with loads of news and updates, and lovely and insightful articles. Enjoy.
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Fresh Updates & NewsPostbox, a privacy-focused email client for Windows and macOS, built for professionals handling and writing a lot of emails, announced that it got acquired by eM Client, an all-in-one client featuring email, calendar, tasks, notes, and more. As part of the acquisition, Postbox announced that users who bought the app can continue using it. However, development will shut down, and support will continue to be available until December 22nd, 2024, while the help center will remain available until December 22nd, 2025. Folks who bought Postbox on or after September 22nd, 2024, are eligible for a 100% discount on the one-time purchase or on the first year of a subscription to eM Client. All other Postbox customers will receive 50% offtheir one-time purchase or first year of subscription to eM Client, and the offer is valid until December 31st, 2024. I do not have any official numbers or statistics, but Postbox always felt like a very niche product to me. I bought a license already years ago, as it was one of the few email clients (maybe even the only one back then) that supported Proton Mail. I really enjoyed its interface, the email composing experience, and some other small stuff, however it never became my primary email client, mainly because there were a lot of bugs and the Proton Mail sync felt quite buggy. Nevertheless, it is sad to see yet another lovely app moving to the app graveyard. Farewell, Postbox. A couple weeks ago, I got access to (yet) another new browser called Surf, developed and created by the team at Deta (who had recently build Deta Cloud which shut down a couple of months ago). With the most recent update, it became a bit more concrete what Surf will be, and what the Deta team is building. Surf is entitled "Your second brain, on steroids". Now, I have some issues with that kind of headline. The term second brain has been all over the internet back in 2020/21 as personal knowledge management, note-taking, and bi-directional linking became mainstream. However, people realized that building a second brain does not magically make you more creative or more productive, there is no general system, and what works for others might not work for you. Secondly, and those are just my feelings reading it, I do not associate anything good with "steroids", they have a lot of side-effects, and are illegal in a lot of places across the world. So, using that kind of metaphor just feels off. Anyway, Surf is a browser that aims to put you on the center of your digital life, as it is a browser, a file manager, and an AI assistant (sigh, yeah I know...) in one single place. When I opened up Surf for the first time, it gave me major Arc vibes, as the UI and design language felt similar. I did not get hooked to it, since its features like super-powered screenshots, PDFs, YouTube videos, files, and more getting organized by themselves would introduce a completely new system to me. With the AI assistant you get access to a personal chat to power through dozens of tabs, hours of podcasts, and thousands of pages. Yet again, I might not be busy enough to feel the urge to chat with my browser and ask an AI assistant any kind of questions. What I do like about Surf though is that all the data is stored locally on the user's device. I am still interested in seeing how Surf will evolve in the future, especially after the announcement of Arc, which you can read about next. So, The Browser Company and its browser product Arc felt weird for a while now. There was a video update a couple months ago in which Josh Miller, CEO, announced that they raised $50m and flew out managers to Paris to talk about what they will build in the future. Fast forward to today, and we have another video update in which Josh Miller, shares the news that the team has been head-down building something transformational, however it is not Arc 2.0 (although Miller has been talking publicly about it for a while now), but instead they are building an entirely new browser. You probably ask yourself now so what is happening with Arc? Well, Miller mentioned that Arc will stay where it is today. According to a post by David Pierce in The Verge, Arc will get stability updates and bug fixes in the future, and there is a dedicated team at The Browser company focusing on those. However, to me it still feels like they just announced the end of Arc, without actually announcing it. It seems like they did not figure out how to monetize the huge user-base of Arc (which quadrupled this year according to the video), so they can pay their investors back. Arc does not have any real way of making money, and the vibe I get from its users feels like not a large portion of them would actually pay for it. Although they have been talking about Arc 2.0 for weeks, they are canceling it now. And the reason for it is because they apparently fell in love with LLMs and they think they will change the way we interact with software. They probably realized too that any kind of company that hat powered by AI written in big bold letters on their product's website raised a ton of money over the course of the last couple of months. Instead of focusing on the product that has a huge user-base, The Browser Company will now focus on AI, because that is exactly what investors love right now. There is one specific section in the video that gave me some serious HUH vibes: at 3:18, Josh Miller talks about how the new product they are building, and he says that the team is probably hating him for saying it like that (he continues to say it anyway), but suddenly he gets enthusiastic about Waymo and its self-driving cars, how wild it is, and how much it feels like floating and gliding around the physical world, and that this is exaclty what they will build for your online world. I have never been in a Waymo, but correct me if I am wrong, it is just a self-driving car, right? Does the fact that a computer is driving the car makes it so special, that it feels like floating around the physical world? It is still a car, with four wheels, driving on the street, right? But it is just doing that without someone in the driver's seat, right? So, it is just that someone decided to build a car, that looks like a car, drives like a car, but removed the driver of the car. To be honest, that describes the landscape of AI pretty good. I am not bashing against AI, but there are so many companies introducing mediocre AI-powered features and integrations for the sake of raising millions instead of thinking about solving real problems. We will see how The Browser Company will revolutionize the way we are gliding through the online world. I try to think about a social network that raised VC money and changed for the better. I can not thing of a single one, so I am skeptical about Bluesky raising a $15m Series A led by Blockchain Captial. And it seems like a lot of others are skeptical too. Although the Bluesky Team pointed out in its announcement post, that the round's lead, Blockchain Capital, does not change the fact that Bluesky and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and will not hyperfinancialize the social experience, it still feels weird seeing that VC leading the round, especially with Jay Graber's, CEO of Bluesky, history in crypto as she been a Software Engineer at Skuchain and Zcash in the past. Now, we all now how web3 created an insane buzz. Loads of people made loads of money, mostly on the behalf of others who lost loads of money. Molly White is highlighting how web3 is just an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet, with her lovely Web3 is Going Just Great project. No one is talking about crypto or web3 anymore. Yet there is this VC pouring $15m into a social network. It is not far-fetched to say, that this blockchain focused VC wants to see some kind of return on his investment. So, there is the question if you want to be part of a social network that will now try to scale to millions of users to then make the investors proud. [It seems like they are working already on a subscription service](Bluesky is working on a subscription, but it won’t give you a blue check). Otis Chandler, who founded Goodreads, launched his new AI-powered reading app, Smashing, curating the best of the web to the public. The goal of the app is to create a community around content. The focus lies on web content like news articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, and more. Additionally, Smashing is packed with an AI Questions feature that allows users to engage with content being shared in different ways. Smashing is available for iOS, and a web version is already in the works. The startup is backed with $3.4m in seed funding. After acquiring Skiff back in February 2024, Notion's new email client is around the corner. According to some reports, it seems like Notion Mail is more like a Gmail client rather than an email client or a traditional email service. Notion's idea is to build an email experience that allows users to ditch the old ways of a rigid inbox. When Notion Mail will exactly launch has not been announced yet, however folks like Casey Newton received already a glimpse into the app. Notion Mail will be yet another step towards a fully featured suite of productivity apps.
Mental Wealth❯ John Quincy Adams on Impostor Syndrome and the True Measure of Success – ““You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Bruce Lee wrote to himself. All expectation is a story of the possible. Every person lives inside a story of who they are, what they are worth, and what is possible for their life, and suffers in proportion to how conscious they are of the story, how much credence they give those inner voices over the raw input of reality. It is often when life blindsides us with a bright counternarrative to a limiting inner story that we suffer the most, because we are suddenly forced to revise our entire personal mythos, to relinquish our familiar ways of keeping ourselves small, to exceed our own expectations of the possible.” ❯ Getting Great Sleep is Much Easier Than You Think – “A few years ago, I started waking up at three o’clock every morning. Over the years, I’d read many articles about the importance of rest, so I knew the research was unequivocal: Quality sleep supports cognitive performance and lowers the risk of diseases and health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, and dementia.” ❯ The Questions at the Heart of Conflict and Peace – ““How do you balance dreams of peace with the complex reality of achieving it,” said conflict researcher Mareike Schomerus, “without giving up on the dream, but without ignoring the reality?” Tensions permeate the work of those trying to understand the roots of conflict and pathways to peace. What motivates people to accept those they’ve only ever learned to hate? Why do people join extremist groups, and how do some get out? How do institutions contribute to violence, and how can they foster peace?” ❯ Why Leadership Teams Fail – “In their pursuit of strong performance, CEOs and executives often overlook a critical factor in organizational success: the health of their leadership team. That’s a big problem, because a dysfunctional team can become a serious drag on strategy execution and erode morale. Not only that, the health of a senior team can make or break a CEO’s tenure.”
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Appendix❯ ICYMI The note-taking app sector is crowded. While the initial hype around those apps has fainted, taking notes is still a powerful practice. So, what matters most when choosing a note-taking app? I asked myself the same question and wrote down my thoughts about choosing therightnote-taking app. ❯ Quick Bits
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