Design is a process of getting stuck & Are you ready for the all-hearing AI wearable?

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 270 👋

After not being able to post a new long-form post last week, I am happy to back with the usual content. Although a specific AI wearable has been all over the news recently, I had a look at another device that just launched, and while it took some privacy measures, it left me with major concerns. How would you feel about being recorded while talking to someone? How would you feel about that whatever you said will get send to some company cloud to process and transform it? How would you feel about the fact that it is not your decision whether to get recorded or not, since the consent mode which that AI wearable is offering, is turned off by default?

We are entering weird times. AI is still thriving, and investors are throwing money at founders and companies who are building the next surveillance tech. There are still so many uncertainties, yet the AI-era feels like a global gold rush, and everyone wants a piece of it. I do believe that AI will play a significant role in our lives, however, if that role means that we are walking around with hardware that records everything around us, I take a step back and say no, thank you.

Leveraging that technology to write lousy content and blog posts and flooding the internet with it, generating deep fakes, scraping artist's work, or creating meeting summaries, is not what I have signed up for.

How are you feeling about the AI-boom?

Are you ready for the all-hearing AI wearable?

To your surprise, this post is not about the Humane AI Pin, which recently became the center of tech news as Marque Brownlee told his 18.6 million subscribers that it is the worst product he has ever reviewed. The device is getting way too hot, it is incredible slow, and the projector makes it hard to read things, while Marques Brownlee mentioned that the overall build quality is remarkable.

This post is about another AI wearable (yeah, I thought one of them was already one too many), that recently came out of stealth. It is called Limitless, it is a web app, a Mac app, a Windows app, and a wearable from the makers of Rewind, an AI assistant which records everything you see, say, or hear on your Mac and iPhone, loved and funded by your favorite elite of venture capital (obviously sarcasm), as Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Elad Gil, David Ulevitch, and others smile at you with their testimonials on Rewind's website.

When I found out about Rewind for the first time, I was excited, as I usually am when there is software that does something completely new, in terms of something I have not seen or experienced before. I really liked its visual design language, its website, and the design of the app, everything felt fresh and new. Nevertheless, an app that records everything you do on your screen, say, and hear does indeed raises some privacy concerns. Rewind states that it is private by design. All your recordings will stay locally on your Mac, so no one else, not even Rewind can access them. Sounds pretty good so far. If you want to use additional features like meeting summarization or Ask Rewind, there is indeed some text-based data which will get sent to the cloud and is encrypted in transit. Fair enough. All that, combined with a hefty price tag of $19 per month (billed yearly) for the Pro subscription, does indeed give me the feeling that Rewind is private by design.

So, I could assume they would apply the same practices to their new app and hardware too, right? Let us take a closer look on Limitless.

Read the whole post here:

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Fresh Updates & News

Post News shutting down →

After Pebble (which shut down back in October 2023), the next Twitter alternative, Post News, announced that it will shut down. Founder Noam Bardin broke the news that the service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform. Post News was backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Scott Galloway, and Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher was an adviser to the company.

Initially, Post's idea was to create a new way for publishers and writers to monetize. Instead of subscribing to various different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets. Post got founded at the same time of varies other Twitter alternatives which used the dissatisfaction of loads of Twitter users with Musk's ownership decisions. Just after a year, Post now decided to shut down.

Webflow acquired Intellimize →

Webflow is exapnding into AI after they announced the acquisition of Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors. The majority of the Intellimize team (which consists of around 50 people) will join Webflow, however, there are some staffers who either took outplacement packages or were let go and given severance. This is Webflow's first ever acquisition and it serves a need many Webflow customers share, which is personalizing and optimizing their websites.

Mental Wealth

❯ The Self-Motivation Toolkit: How to Stay Curious and Committed – “Motivation is a fickle friend. One day, you’re bursting with energy and enthusiasm, tackling your projects with a sense of flow. The next, you find yourself stuck in a rut, struggling to muster the drive to get anything done. It’s a frustrating cycle that can leave you feeling helpless and unproductive. This is especially true for long-term projects that involve some of the slower, longer-term kind of grind, such as writing content and building communities. You know you care, but you’re bound to have days where it’s just hard to get to work.”

❯ The Things Users Would Appreciate In Mobile Apps – “Remember the “mobile first” mantra? The idea was born out of the early days of responsive web design. Rather than design and build for the “desktop” up front, a “mobile-first” approach treats small screens as first-class citizens. There’s a reduced amount of real estate, certainly less than the number of pixels we get from the viewport of Firefox expanded fullscreen on a 27-inch studio monitor.”

❯ How to measure UX research impact: A multi-level framework – “You might be very busy conducting research, but what if most of your work collects dust in someone’s drawer? Whether you are the only UX researcher in your organisation or part of a larger team: it makes sense to reflect on the impact of user research regularly.”

❯ Design is a process of getting stuck – “Whenever I’m in a room without a whiteboard I feel trapped. Perhaps this is just the way I have to think through a problem but I can’t breakdown ideas or solutions without a whiteboard or a glass window to draw on. In fact, I’d say that the most unproductive conversations I’ve had with folks is simply down to the fact that I didn’t sit them in front of a whiteboard, put a pen in their hand, and tell them to draw their argument back to me.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

ProductivePrivacy is the directory packed with privacy-focused, end-to-end encrypted, and open source productivity apps and tools. Besides that, it is home for deep dives into those apps, and posts at the intersection of privacy, security, and productivity.

❯ Quick Bits

• Netflix doc accused of using AI to manipulate true crime story
• Roku forcing 2-factor authentication after 2 breaches of 600K accounts
• Crypto influencer guilty of $110M scheme that shut down Mango Markets
• Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal cover
• Influential women's tech network shuts down unexpectedly
• EU demands answers on money-for-views version of TikTok
• OpenAI Slams Musk’s ‘Revisionist History’ in Bid to Toss Lawsuit
• UK children bombarded by gambling ads and images online, charity warns
• How OpenAI and Microsoft reawakened a sleeping software giant
• In biggest-ever election year, tech platforms are wide open for voter manipulation
• Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director
• WhatsApp, Threads, more banished from Apple App Store in China

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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