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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.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 318 👋Well, we have a packed newsletter with quite a lot of news and updates. I have not wrote such a long newsletter in a while, but as I stumbled across all those bits and pieces of news and updates throughout my week, I just kept going, taking notes, and ultimately adding them to the newsletter. I still try to keep the newsletter dense and easy to skimm through as I do not want to overwhelm or overload your inbox. On another note, I have been three weeks into my new job, and I have to say, while I enjoyed all the free-time to fully work on my side-projects, I definitely appreciate being back at work, experience structure and organisation, and just knowing what I should and have to work on whenever I get in front of my desk and Mac. And this gets motivated and energized for everything to come. I really enjoy the vibes within the team so far. I obviously still work on my side-projects, but it feels great to work on them on the side, and not getting caught up in all the things I want to work on by literally having too much time. But yeah, feels good to be back within a team, and contribute where I can help out.
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Fresh Updates & NewsGhost has been constantly sharing its progress of integrating with ActivityPub, and in its most recent newsletter, they announced the public beta for Ghost(Pro), which means if you are subscribed to Ghost(Pro) you can enable the 'Social web (beta)' from Ghosts "Labs" settings, where they share experimental and WIP features. As this is beta, there are still some things that will get improved incrementally. For example, if you activate this feature to interact with the social web with your publication from Ghost, your handle will consists of two parts, the first one is @index, representing the home, or index of your publication, and this can not be customized yet, but the team at Ghost is working on that. The second part is you domain name, where your site lives. Ghost's ActivityPub integration consits of the Inbox and the Feed. The Inbox acts just like your email inbox. Whenever you follow other publications on the social web, new post they publish will pop up within your inbox. Long-form posts from platforms like Ghost and WordPress live in the inbox. In contrary to that, in the Feed you can do casual browsing through short-form content. To learn more about Ghost's public social web beta, check out their freshly created documentation on how to set it up, how it works, what is missing, and what is already working. Dribbble updated its Terms of Services which now requires designers and clients who meet on Dribbble must keep payments on Dribbble. So, what does that mean? Well, designers are no longer permitted to display or share their contact information prior to client payment. After the payment, designers and clients are able to exchange contact information. Dribbble justifies this caging change that designers can now receive requests, send proposals, deliver work, and get paid, entirely through Dribbble. But to me, this also sounds like Designers no longer can hold on to the control of their contacts, copyrights, licensing, usage terms, agreements, or payment terms. Dribbble has always entitled itself (and they still do so now) as a platform to help and elevate designers, however, with this recent change they pretty much eliminated all of their efforts in that realm. France's Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs and Germany's Center for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration (both governmental agencies) collaboratively launched an open source Notion alternative called "Docs", that offers a collaborative document editor, flexible export options, and you will soon be able to transform documents into knowledge bases as Docs is already working on subpages, a powerful search, and the ability to pin important documents. With its 7.2 update, Vivaldi focused on bringing a faster and better browsing experience to its users. First, this update introduces a smarter and faster address bar, with no more delays, and just the info you want and need. Secondly, they also worked faster page load, as 7.2 introduces a new optimized connection handling. Power users have been waiting for this, so with this new update, you can now override keyboard shortcuts to further tailor your workflows in Vivaldi. Besides that, if you are using Vivaldi's Email and Calendar apps, you can now create an event directly from an email, or from a web page. This is handy in case you got a meeting request, or a concert ticket confirmation for example, since then you no longer need to copy and paste details manually, but simply right-click and create the event instantly. To see all the changes, improvements, and fixes, head over to Vivaldi's blog, they also released an exciting new update for Vivaldi iOS too. Day One has been one of the most popular, powerful, yet simple journaling app for over a decade. During that time, Day One served users through apps for macOS, iOS, Android, and the web. To take the next big step towards offering Day One on all platforms, the team just introduced Day One for Windows, and you can download and install it right away from the Microsoft Store. Day One for Windows offers local-first storage ensuring fast performance, offline access, and a permanent record of your writing, end-to-end encryption so your journal remains private, cross-device sync, and to celebrate the launch, limited-time free access which means the Windows app will not count against your device limit, allowing users to try Day One on Windows at no cost. The Windows version of Day One is packed with all the features users already loved, effortless journaling, multimedia support, powerful search, daily prompts, and export and backup options. Within the announcement blog post, Paul Mayne, founder of Day One, also shared that the team is working on introducing AI-powered tools that will help users reflect more deply with context-aware prompts, summarize past entries, and more. Butter, an app that focuses on help teams effortlessly plan, run, and recap workshops, trainings, and meetings, just announced that it got acquired by Miro. After Freehand in 2023, Cardinal in May 2024, and Uizard in June 2024, Butter is the most recent company joining Miro. Butter launched back in 2020. They were facilitating workshops themselves, and made it their mission to help remote teams navigate the new world. As they discovered that facilitators were overloaded by the number of tools they needed to use to create an engaging workshop, they decided to build Butter. Fast-forward to today, and the Butter team is joining Miro, as it will allow them to take their ambitions even further. According to Butter's announcement blog post, users can continue using Butter and keep running their sessions on Butter Video and Butter Scenes. The team will double down on the future of facilitation with Miro, and they will continue with users' insights, feedback, and ideas. Play just launched its Xcode integration in beta, which allows you to bring your product ideas to life, as well as reduce dev time. Play is a phenomenal tool that gives users the possibility to design and prototype apps, however, with the new Xcode integration you can go one step further, and even ship your app to the App Store. Thanks to Play's SKD you can take everything you have created in Play and bring it into Xcode to compile and submit to the App Store. The final export package from Play includes an Xcode project with a MainApp pre-configured to render your Play Designs using a single build-and-run command. It also contains a custom Swift Package, available in UIKit or SwiftUi, that includes fonts, assets, colors, variables, Components, and Pages saved in Play. And then, it contains the PlaySDK, which enables your Play designs to be rendered as native code. Super interesting.
Mental Wealth❯ The Three Styles of Curiosity – “Curiosity is a strong desire to learn or know something. But according to researcher Perry Zurn, curiosity is not a singular thing. In fact, there may be at least three styles of curiosity that could have different benefits for our well-being and for the societies we live in.” ❯ How to make your life feel more meaningful – “Everyone seems on edge these days. Turning on the news or scrolling through your social media feed provides a constant stream of things to worry about. Many countries have witnessed rapid growth in rates of anxiety, as well as depression and other psychopathologies. What can we do to help cope with these dark and anxious feelings?” ❯ Does Exercise Really Benefit Your Mental Health? – “There’s tons of evidence, from hundreds of studies with hundreds of thousands of participants, showing that exercise is an effective tool to combat depression and other mental health issues like anxiety. These studies find that it’s at least as good as drugs or therapy, and perhaps even better. It’s now recommended in official guidelines around the world as a stand-alone or secondary treatment. Still, there’s an important caveat to consider: is all this evidence of a connection between exercise and mental health any good?” ❯ The Battle Between Shipping and Perfection: A Designer’s Dilemma – “Designers, let’s talk about an uncomfortable truth. For many of us, the joy of our craft lies in creating work that is not just functional but exceptional. We love unearthing hidden user insights through research, challenging assumptions, and asking the kinds of questions that lead to elegant, transformative solutions. To us, this feels like the very essence of design: solving the problem in the best way possible. But here’s the rub...”
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Appendix❯ ICYMI The reality behind personal knowledge management: why complex productivity systems fail, how true note-taking thrives, and what remains when the hype fades. In my post Systems Over Substance, I take a critical look at the PKM landscape.
❯ Quick Bits
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