A file explorer from the future & Paying attention

My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the weekly digest about creativity and productivity-boosting tools and resources, combined with useful insights, articles, and findings from the fields of design and tech. The newsletter built for the creative community.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 226 👋

There haven't been any new blog posts, deep dives, or interviews published at Creativerly. The reason for that is very simple. A couple months ago, I realized that my body sent me signals related to the fact that I had too much on my plate and stressed myself regarding the process of all my side-project. During that time, I decided to prioritize and plan all my side-project. That means, I had a look at all the things I wanted to built and asked myself what things I should prioritize. At Creativerly, things are going great, I am publishing the newsletter every single week since over four years now, I developed a writing habit, and it is simply part of my week to write and curate the newsletter. Still, I have loads of ideas for Creativerly, how to evolve the content, how to deliver more value to readers, and how to branch into other areas. But besides that, for the longest time, I wanted to ship an update to ProductivePrivacy, the directory website featuring open source, privacy-focused, and end-to-end encrypted productivity tools. The first version which is still online is a MVP I built with Softr. As the project evolved and gained traction, I wanted to make sure that it is easy to browse through it and discover privacy-focused apps and tools.

Therefore, I wanted to build a new website, featuring a better directory UI, blog posts, and a newsletter. While Creativerly needs my consistent attention, since I simply write it every single week. But there is still time to look into other things. While there has not been that much content other than the weekly newsletter at Creativerly, I have been building and finishing up the new version of ProductivePrivacy, and I am incredibly excited to publish the site and share it with you soon. I am a privacy advocate, and I always try to highlight open-source, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy focused tools and alternatives to apps from big corporations that are making money of the data they collect. Therefore, ProductivePrivacy is a project that I am excited about. The directory will help users discover more privacy-focused apps, and with the blog I get the chance to inform interested readers about the topic of privacy even more.

Creativerly readers will be among the first to know once ProductivePrivacy launches. I am 90% there. Stay tuned.

Apps, Software, Tools

Spacedrive →

No matter which field you are operating in, during your daily work you are probably handling a lot of files, both on hard or external drives and within your clouds. Managing all those files, organizing, and bringing structure to them could become a tedious task. Spacedrive is a lovely-looking tool, that entitles itself as the „file explorer from the future“. Spacedrive combines your drives and clouds into one database, so you can organize and explore them from any device.

Every file you own Spacedrive accounts for. It uniquely fingerprints and extracts metadata so you can sort, tag backup, and share files without limitations of any cloud provider. Since Spacedrive is a cross-platform file manager, it gives you the possibility to connect your devices together to help you organize files from anywhere. You can think of Spacedrive as a Swiss army knife file explorer, or more importantly, your personal database. Spacedrive identifies your files uniquely, understanding more file types than any operating system. This gives you the power and the possibility to create photo albums that you will never lose, effortlessly catalogue terabytes of video, move files between devices dynamically to optimize space and redundancy, generate preview media for easy viewing, automate security and encryption, and a lot more. I can totally see the need for an app like Spacedrive. I found myself in the situation of managing files across different devices and cloud services way too often. It costs so much time and blocks me during work to find out where I saved a specific file or document I am looking for.

By giving you the possibility to connect all your devices and cloud storages, Spacedrive makes sure that no file gets left behind. It removes a lot of friction some users might experience when managing and organizing their files. With Spacedrive, you will always find the file you are looking for, no matter which device you are using. Spacedrive combines the storage capacity and processing power of your devices into one personal distributed cloud, that is both secure and intuitive to use.

The motivation of the Spacedrive team is clear. Loads of people manage multiple cloud accounts, they are using hard drives that are not backed up, which leads to the risk of data loss. During our day-to-day life most people heavily rely on cloud services like Google Photo and iCloud. At the same time, those providers lock in users with limited capacity and almost zero interoperability between services and operating systems. Your files should not be stuck in a device ecosystem. The Spacedrive team states that "they should be OS agnostic, permanent, and personally owned". That is the main motivation behind Spacedrive.

Spacedrive is open-source, you can star the project on GitHub and support it on Open Collective. As of writing this, Spacedrive has not arrived yet. You can sign up for the waitlist, and follow the development on GitHub. Spacedrive will be available for macOS, Windows, and Linux first, with apps for iOS and Android arriving shortly after. Spacedrive is an incredible existing open-source tool, and I can not wait to see what they are building. On June 13th, they also announced a $2m funding round lead by Joseph Jacks from OSS Capital, and investors like Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch, Tobias Lütke, and more joining the round.

Webstudio →

Website builders and tools like Webflow and Framer became increasingly popular over the last couple of years. They give designers but also folks from other disciplines the possibility to create websites without the need of writing a single line of code. Webflow definitely has a certain learning curve, Framer too, but people who are used to design tools like Sketch or Figma will probably get a hang of it fast. Webstudio is another app entering the highly competitive space of website builders. Compared to Webflow and Framer, Webstudio's builder is open source and MIT licensed, which means you can be sure that you will never experience platform-login, since you can self host, contribute to the development, and even create your own software on top of Webstudio's technology.

Webstudio gives designers superpowers that were exclusive to developers in the past. Similar to Webflow, Webstudio visually translates CSS without obscuring it. It gives you the possibility building a static site and publishing it to Webstudio Cloud for free. The tool has been in the since mid 2022, and the newest release introduced Webstudio Beta, which means everyone can give it a try. The Webstudio experience can be explained very easily: it lets you directly interact with HTML and CSS to build more creative and capable websites. No matter if you would like to build a simple landing page or an entire web app, Webstudio will be your canvas while building what you have been dreaming of. The core vision of Webstudio is to give you limitless powers. Web designers and visual developers should get the power and the needed features to go from idea to actually building it fast and without any hassle.

What sets Webstudio clearly apart from competitors is the fact there is no platform lock-in, the whole user experience has been tailored to designers, and it is offering extreme performance. Since Webstudio is open source, it is also following a community-first approach, which means if you have any ideas for improvement, you can directly share them with Webstudio's core team. Additionally, both ownership and privacy are core pillars of Webstudio. By default it does not use any Google tracking and it offers free GDPR-compliant hosting with the option to self-host what you have built with Webstudio. You can be sure that you own what you are building, whether it is your site or your data. Besides that, performance is another focused area. With Webstudio you will get WebP-optimized images, workers-based cloud, and supper efficient rendering. Thanks to design tokens you no longer have to worry about classes.

But that is not it. Features like real-time collaboration, backend versatility, native extensibility, AI integration, UI kits, versioning, Figma Tokens Sync, CMS and databases, versioning, and a lot more is already in the pipeline.

Webstudio Beta has been launched, and you can give it a try. It is without a doubt one of the most exciting new projects within its field, and I can not wait to see how Webstudio will evolve. I will definitely keep an eye on it.

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Fresh Updates & News

Coda AI →

The AI-Boom is still going strong and more and more companies are introducing their AI integrations. Coda AI is their new work assistant, which got built for the future of work. To delegate repetitive tasks, rethink content creation, and get insights faster, Coda AI introduces three new building blocks, powered by AI. The first one is Coda AI assistant, to draft content, generate tables, find information, reference your own data, and more. With Coda AI Column you can create data for an entire column in a table, using a single AI prompt. And the third one Coda AI Block, that lets you summarize, highlight action items, and convert data to text.
With Coda AI you can turn your data and information into organized insights with Coda AI‘s ability to reference, summarize, and extract key findings.

Uizard Autodesigner →

Uizard is an easy-to-use design tool to design mock-ups, web apps, wireframes, prototypes, and more in minutes and with ease. Additionally, Uizard has been a pioneer when it comes to design-related AI integration. The newest addition to its feature-set is called Autodesigner. Uizard Autodesigner gives you the possibility to use simple text to generate multi screen mock-ups for apps and websites. You can think of Autodesigner like ChatGPT but for UI/UX design. The goal of Autodesigner is to help you bring your vision to life in seconds. Just by entering and typing out your project ideas Autodesigner will bring your app vision to life in a matter of seconds.

Deta →

Deta is an incredibly exciting startup from Berlin, building Deta Space, a personal cloud computer that belongs to you, goes with you anywhere, and gives your apps and data a new home and a new life. With Space apps you own and control your data, since every app live in its own sandbox. Among the Space apps that have already been built by the community you will find Webcrate (to group, organize, and share links), File box (a fast file storage for large files), Minima (a calm text editor for your thoughts), Golem (an open-source ChatGPT UI alternative), and a lot more.

Sera’s brand new website explains their goals and vision. In a recent update, the team at Deta also reworked their docs to provide guidance for users and developers.

Mental Wealth

❯ To Build a Top Performing Team, Ask for 85% Effort – "Despite some companies’ attempts, we can’t fix today’s burnout culture with a wellness app. What it takes, instead, is a mindset and culture shift among managers and organizations everywhere."

❯ Paying Attention – "Sherlock Holmes says in the book, The Study of Scarlet: I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands. This was written in 1887. Imagine how he’d feel today – phone buzzing in his pocket, social media feeds gushing out useless information."

❯ How to Make Friends as an Adult – "Romantic relationships get all the attention, but I’d argue that friendships are just as important—if not more so—for our health and happiness. Just like with romantic relationships, creating fulfilling, lasting friendships as an adult can be really hard. But… Why?"

❯ The UX Research Reckoning is Here – "No one’s releasing detailed data about which roles were eliminated during this year of layoffs. But from a distance, it appears User Experience Research teams have been absolutely crushed. Hundreds of UXRs have lost their jobs. Cast aside despite their hard work, so many talented folks deserve an explanation."

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Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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