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 319 👋

So, I have a bit of an announcement, nothing big, nothing serious, but starting today, I am switching to a new publishing schedule from Sunday 19:00 CET, to Monday 19:00 CET. Again, nothing big, nothing serious, but over the course of the past couple of weeks and months, I realized that whenever I found not that much time throughout the week to write the newsletter, I had to force myself to finish it up over the weekend. However, as spring is arriving in my hometown, there were so many things I wanted to do, rather than spending a couple of hours in front of my Mac. Additionally, as I am adapting to a new work schedule throughout my week, it should be fairly streamlined to allocate some time throughout my week and dedicate it to the newsletter, with the goal that I either just need to do some final touches on the weekend or none at all, and simply schedule the newsletter for Monday, as this also gives me buffer to make some additional edits last minute.

In general, I am currently restructuring my workflows and reallocating my time, so I can work on all my side-projects, but also make room for personal and private stuff. While writing, curating, and preparing the newsletter for Creativerly every single week is a habit and simply part of my week and my life, there are still days on which I am lacking motivation and creative energy to actually sit down and write the newsletter. In the past, I learned that when I force myself to do the creative work in such situations (side-note: that almost never works out) I get overwhelmed and I do not enjoy working on Creativerly at all. And I want to prevent those kind of situations. Creativerly is not the only side-project I am working on, there are a bunch more, and I switch between the work for those every now and then.

With restructuring my days, workflows, and reallocating my working hours I get the chance to leverage and allocate my creative energy to where I currently need it.

Moving Creativerly to a new publishing schedule is a minor but important change towards that creative energy allocation. So, from now on, I hope you enjoy Creativerly on Monday rather than on Sunday (or in fact on any other day that fits your schedule).

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Fresh Updates & News

MindNode introduces Automatic Layout with a Personal Touch →

MindNode is one of the most popular apps to create mind maps to brainstorm visually and get a clear picture of your next side project, event, or business. Recently, the company celebrated its 17th anniversary. One of the core features of the initial release of MindNode was Manual Layout which gave users the possibility to place nodes on the canvas freely, as usually MindNode automatically place those.

In early 2024, MindNode shipped MindNode Next, a brand new app, that builds on a new foundation, optimized for the age of spatial computing and collaboration. After shipping for Apple Vision Pro first, it got shipped to macOS, iOS, and iPadOS in November 2024. MindNode Next has given the team the opportunity to rethink the Manual Layout feature. With the newest update, users now have the possibility to move any node freely while keeping its relative position to its parent. Compared to the classic version, in MindNode Next all other nodes will continue to follow automatic layout rules, to ensure that adding and repositioning nodes results in a more consistent and predictable structure.

This new approach replaces the Manual Layout feature. Markus MĂŒller-Simhofer, CEO and founder of MindNode, calls this new approach 'Automatic Layout with a Personal Touch'. You can join MindNode's public beta and give this new feature a try. If you do so, make sure to provide feedback to the team.

Capacities Calendar integrations are now available in Capacities Pro →

Subscribers of the Capacities Pro Plan can now integrate Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 Calendar with the app. This gives users the possibility to display calendar events in the Capacities calendar to have an overview of all your events on a given day. Additionally, from the Capacities calendar you can quickly create objects that are synced to the calendar event. In order to connect an object to a calendar event, it needs a date property. If that is the case, you can link your calendar event to the date property of the object. Synchronization of events between your calendar and Capacities is not real-time, which means it can take up to 30 seconds to update or display.

Capacities is planning to extend the calendar integrations to more calendar apps in the future, including Apple Calendar, and the CalDAV standard.

Height is shutting down with September 24th, 2025 being the final day of service →

It is always tough to read about the news of an app shutting down, but reading that Height is shutting down operations felt different, as I always had the feeling they were thriving and vibing, building a beautifully-designed project management app. What also feels a bit odd is the announcement from CEO and founder Michaël Villar, which you can find on Height's website. It could not be more generic, leaving users and people who are interested in knowing what has happened with open questions and assumptions.

Height's last day of service will be September 24th, 2025. Until then, users and teams who had been relying on Height should have found an alternative to continue managing their projects, tasks, and work.

Mental Wealth

❯ Humanity is at a Crossroads – “In our post-industrial, software-driven age of dwindling resources, we need to learn lessons and take action faster than ever before, says Tim Brown. The modern world is full of complexity, but often the simple narratives we hear from politicians, the media and in wider discussion fail to clearly and effectively address the realities and repercussions of how complex global systems interrelate. That’s a problem, because human beings are drawn to simple narratives like moths to a flame — it’s one of our great evolutionary strengths, but also a debilitating weakness."

❯ The Surprising Reason Writing Remains Essential in an AI-Driven World – “Why write an essay when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you? Why write an email when AI can auto-respond for you with all the typical pleasantries and talking-points? While AI doing these things for you is likely to happen, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Even when these tools exist, they are not a replacement for writing.”

❯ Great software design looks underwhelming – “Years ago I spent a lot of time reviewing coding challenges. The challenge itself was very straightforward - building a CLI tool that hit an API and allowed the user to page through and inspect the data. We allowed any language, so I saw all kinds of approaches1. At one point I came across a challenge I thought was literally perfect. It was a single Python file (maybe thirty lines of code in total), written in a very workmanlike style: the simplest, most straightforward way to meet the challenge requirements.”

❯ The Great AI UI Unification – “He just... tweeted it out. I had this whole rant ready to go in my head about the UX state of the various AI tools – and ChatGPT in particular, since it's the most popular and most egregious – when Sam Altman pre-empted the post with his tweet a couple days ago...”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

French and German governments have joined forces to develop and launch an open source Notion alternative called "Docs". Docs is a collaborative document editor that could potentially replace non-EU platforms like Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, and others. This is a governmental-led initiative towards digital sovereignty, and providing a secure and private alternative to big tech solutions. Find out more about Docs in my recent post: French and German governments join forces to launch Open Source Notion alternative called "Docs"

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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