Unpacking “Craft” in the Software Interface & The Five Pillars of Creative Flow

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 301 👋

I am incredible tired. 2024 has been probably the most tiring year I went through. My most recent struggle has been the result of the state election in Styria, the state in which I am living. After the general election and the EU election in Austria, the far-right party FPÖ now also won the state election in Austria, doubling their percentage compared to the last election. The most tiring thing about that result is that the FPÖ and its leaders and members have been constantly all over the news for corruption, fiscal evasion, and all sorts of neo-nazi bullshit. And yet, people went on and gave their votes to them, since they want change, and someone who solves problems like inflation and migration, both leading topics of the FPÖ in Styria, however it seems like little do the voters know that those are not topics which get solved or even worked on on state level.

When FPÖ voters got interviewed and asked why they voted for the party, they mentioned that they are scared by all the immigrants coming to Austria and Styria. Again, it seems like those voters know little to nothing, as the immigrant families of which Styria is currently taking care off is at an all-time low.

I am struggling waking up each day and find motivation and energy to just live my life, when everything around me is just collapsing and fragmenting. However, even in the darkest times I find hope. I have hope that it will change for the better. And I will do my best to continue raising my voice, informing, and especially communicating. While it is exhausting and tiring, I will continue, every single day, driven and guided by the deep hope I have to change the world for the better.

Systems Over Substance: The Underwhelming Truth of Personal Knowledge Management

Let us take a quick trip into the past, more precisely let us look back at 2020 when suddenly note-taking, backlinks, personal knowledge management, and building a second brain became the most hyped things of the internet. People called it a revolution, gleaming apps popped up everywhere, and content creators started selling courses introducing complex tagging and linking systems. Productivity gurus preached that once you start organizing your thoughts, you become more productive, and ultimately transform yourself into an idea machine.

I wouldn‘t say that tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, Logseq, or even Notion led to this promise of digital salvation. It feels like the users of those apps, the content creators of the courses for those apps were the ones amplifying that mentioned apps weren‘t just note-taking tools, but rather portals to an idealized version of ourselves. You had to use those apps to become the perpetually organized, endlessly creative knowledge worker who could capture fevers fleeting insight with surgical precision. People tried out and applied new note-taking systems every single week, each more complex than the last. We got convinced that the right combination of tags, links, and folders would unlock our intellectual potential.

However, systems are not substance. After the initial excitement waned, a stark reality emerged: the people who spent hours of their time meticulously crafting their systems and constructed knowledge repositories remained just that–repositories. Unused. Untouched.

Instead of actual intellectual work, people have been working on an organizational fantasy.

Read the whole post here:

Systems Over Substance: The Underwhelming Truth of Personal Knowledge Management

The reality behind personal knowledge management: why complex productivity systems fail, how true note-taking thrives, and what remains when the hype fades. A critical look at the PKM landscape.

Creativerly •Philipp Temmel

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Fresh Updates & News

Anytype's autumn updates →

The most recent updates for Anytype brought a dedicated focus on technical improvements, and laying the groundwork for future features and enhancements. Besides that, the search functionality has been updated with a new library to improve speed, so users with extensive spaces experience a faster search. Additionally, you are now able to browse all your content from a single location, sort it by date or name, find unlinked objects, and manage multiple objects at once. While those updates are focused on the desktop experience, the Android and iOS apps of Anytype also received some improvements like a new home screen to make it easier to navigate between objects, visual improvements, bug fixes, and more.

Ghost progresses with its ActivityPub integration →

After announcing earlier this year that Ghost is federating over ActivityPub to become part of the world's largest publishing network, the team has made constant progress towards the goal of building an ActivityPub feed directly into Ghost. In the newest issue of their weekly newsletter in which they share their progress, you can get a glimpse into the feed and inbox views they have been testing throughout the past couple of months. It is incredibly exciting to see how things are coming together, and I deeply appreciate the folks at Ghost sharing all the small wins and fails along the way.

Mental Wealth

❯ Unpacking “Craft” in the Software Interface – “It is the very familiar things in life which are often the most difficult to define ... So it is with the concept of craftsmanship. We know what we mean by it, or seem to do so. We can call to mind examples of it and we can recognize it when we see it, or so we think. We speak of good or bad craftsmanship as if we had built-in standards and criteria ready to hand. And the closer we look at it the more complicated it all becomes.”

❯ Unlocking the hidden power of art: How creative expression boosts well-being – “When you think about the word “art,” what comes to mind? A child’s artwork pinned to the fridge? A favorite artist whose work always inspires? Abstract art that is hard to understand?”

❯ The Five Pillars of Creative Flow – “Have you ever been so deeply immersed in a creative activity—writing, designing, coding, or even brainstorming—that time seemed to disappear, and the world around you faded away? This state is known as being in the zone or getting in the flow.”

❯ Great products transcend the Usability vs. Utility debate – “Your design team is pushing for simplification to make users’ lives easier. Your sales team is advocating for power features to close deals. Your customer success team is demanding both — a clearly impossible feat.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

Have you ever hoped for a calm and cozy browser environment that fuels your project workflows rather than getting you drowned and lost in countless tabs? Then, you might be interested in Horse Browser and its lovely Trails feature, a powerful way to organise every single page, task, or project by nesting them, creating a natural flow of your internet journey. To get more insights into how Horse Browser works, and how I am using it for my workflows, check out the deep dive I wrote about it.

❯ Quick Bits

• News Influencers Have Eclipsed Traditional Media (Makena Kelly / Wired)
• Apple Intelligence notification summaries are honestly pretty bad (Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica)
• Google will stop serving political ads in the EU, including on YouTube (Anna Washenko / Engadget)
• The EU publishes the first draft of regulatory guidance for general purpose AI models (Will Shanklin / Engadget)
• OpenAI confirms new ChatGPT app for Windows with universal access (Graeme Hanna / ReadWrite)
• Bluesky celebrates 19M users as it’s projected to hit 20M today (Sophie Atkinson / ReadWrite)
• TikTok parent ByteDance reportedly values itself at $300B (Anthony Ha / TechCrunch)
• AI cloning of celebrity voices outpacing the law, experts warn (Robert Booth / The Guardian)
• India slaps Meta with five-year ban on sharing info from WhatsApp for ads (Simon Sharwood / The Register)
• Substack says it could be profitable — but it still isn’t (Wes Davis / The Verge)
• Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, positioning itself as a key player in the AI arms race (Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat)
• Microsoft’s controversial Recall scraper is finally entering public preview (Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica)

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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