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 314 👋

In case you are visiting Creativerly more regularly, you might have seen three new posts during the past week. For quite some time, I had the wanted to try out a new content format at Creativerly. In the past, I really enjoyed writing about current news, however, it's hard to keep up with the pace and topicality. So, I wanted to find a way to still react and write about current news, but streamline my writing and publishing process. As a result of that, I came up with a writing framework that consists of three parts: 'The News', 'My Thoughts', and 'Conclusion'. In the 'The News' section I state... the news, followed by the 'My Thoughts' section in which I gather my thoughts and notes on the news, my initial reaction, analyze the impact, share my personal experience related to the news (if I have any), and share any future implications or critical perspective, and then finish with the 'Conclusion' in which I summarize, look ahead, and share my final thoughts.

This framework is nothing special, but it helped me write three news post during the past week, and therefore, I'm excited to continue with it, as I always enjoyed writing about news. With this framework I can quickly get down the main point of the news, while then capturing my personal thoughts and my perspective.

I'm not going to switch to only writing about news, since there are a lot of folks doing that already, and I still prefer writing deeply analyzed posts about apps, software, tech, creativity, writing, and design. But every now and then, I enjoy diversifying what I am writing about, and then this framework comes in handy to react to current news and publish those reactions to my site.

To follow the news I am writing about and reacting to, you can head over to Creativerly's 'News' tag page.

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Fresh Updates & News

Obsidian is now free for work →

Obsidian announced that as of now, the Commercial license that allows two or more employees use the app for work is optional, which means Obsidian is now free work work. You can still grab the Commercial license in order to support Obsidian, the folks working on it, and its development. It was amazing to read that people in over 10,000 organizations currently rely on Obsidian for their work, and the newly created Enterprise page partially features those organization, among them Amazon, Google, UK Government, Communication Security Establishment Canada, Apple, Datadog, Stripe, and a lot more.

Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian and broadly know online as kepano, described this change as another step towards Obsidian's endeavor for simplicity, as users were confosued about the Commercial license terms because of unnecessary complexity.

HP acquires parts of disastrously failed Humane →

In hindsight it's easy to say how much Humane has been set up for failure straight from the beginning, but some smart people in tech have predicted its downfall quite early too. Anyway, the fact that HP partially acquired Humane (not including Humane's AI pin device business) for $116 million (although Humane raised $230 million) after Humane tried to sell itself to HP for $1 billion, is as descriptive as it can get for Humane's downfall. Additionally, and this speaks for the talent HP is acquiring, from building and designing a non-functional AI wearable, that was overpriced, did not solve any of technology's problems, now produced a ton of waste, some folks from Humane are now helping to inject artificial intelligence into... in-house printers at HP.

What a ride.

Affinity ships free extensive 2.6 update →

In case you are owning V2 of the Affinity suite, you should be able to update to 2.6 which brings some exciting updates and improvements. Among them, you find the new Object Selection Tool in Affinity Photo, which is Affinity's first Machine Learning tool, that lets you automatically select objects of your choosing in an image. The feature is optional, and it requires downloading of the relevant model for it to work. It's installed as a pre-trained model, and it doesn't use any of your own data for further training according to Affinity. Another new Machine Learning feature in Affinity Photo is Select Subject which analyses your image and selects what it considers to be the main subject of the scene.

In Affinity Publisher, your spreads can now contain more than two pages, which makes it easy to create trifold, gatefold, accordion-fold, and other page arrangements. Thanks to Reflow Pages, Reflow Through Spread, and Add Pages, you now have new options in Publisher that help you manage your pages.

Affinity Designer received a bunch of Pencil Tool improvements, Pen Tool improvements, and Node Tool improvements. This is a huge update. So, to get all the insights into the release notes and made improvements, make sure to head over to Affinity's 'What's New' page.

Lazy.so no longer requires 30 min. 1<>1 onboarding to get access →

Do you remember Lazy? The app to capture at the speed of thought? To be honest, I pretty much forgot about it existing. But after receiving an email from the recently, I got reminded that I have been on the waitlist to get access to the app for I don't know how many years. In case you don't know about Lazy, which is totally legitimate, as its introduction goes back to the hype-times of personal knowledge management back in 2020, here is a rundown.

Initially, Lazy got introduced back in 2019. Back then, it was an app to control your environment with one easy keyboard shortcut. It was quite popular, gained over 700 upvotes on ProductHunt, received a Golden Kitty award, and got some media coverage. One year after the introduction of Lazy, founder Ahmed Men announced the product's pivot to creating an app to capture, take notes, and save information. In October 2020, Lazy raised a seed round and hired a tiny team to build up on that mission. Two years later, the "new" Lazy got introduced. In 2022, Lazy rode the productivity and PKM hype-wave, loads of people posted online that they got shown a prototype of Lazy and stated how this app will completely change their lives. As the PKM hype-wave slowly began to flatten, Lazy quickly jumped on the next one in 2023, by introducing Lazy AI. While they started opening up their doors, it required a 30 min 1-on-1 onboarding call to get access, a practice that went viral with the introduction of Superhuman (yes, the email client that used to cost $30 per month). I received such an onboarding for Superhuman years ago, and while I got excited about it, today it feels simply weird that it needs a human-being explaining me how to use an app.

At the end of 2023, Lazy started exploring a self-serving onboarding (lovely), but it seemed like invites only rolled out slowly. As I no longer used Twitter, and rarely been active on LinkedIn (the two sites to which Lazy posted its updates), it got a bit quiet around the app. Maybe the reason for that is that I got disconnected to the field of productivity and PKM as I was done with gurus telling me what app and what system I should use, however, I haven't seen much videos or articles floating around the web, which could be another reason I forgot about it existing. At the end of 2024, some videos started popping up on YouTube again though.

Although, I feel settled with the current tools I am using as I haven't switched in quite some time, I still wanted to give Lazy a try, since after exploring it, there could be the chance to write a deep dive and analysis about it that might be of value for other folks. However, after clicking the link in the email I received, I found out that the only way to sign up to the app is by using a Google account. Now, I do still have a Google account (although I pretty much degoogled my online life) but I try to minimise its usage. So, now I have to weigh in based on my expectations, the information I have about Lazy, and my interest, whether it's worth signing up, exploring, and writing down my thoughts about it. We will see.

Mental Wealth

❯ The Quest to Imagine a Workplace that (Actually) Values Work-Life Balance – “Changing entrenched work culture is hard. I had a front-row seat to a project that tried. In 2018, the behavioral design firm ideas42 kicked off a project to better understand what drives people to overwork and to test interventions that would improve individual work-life conflict and well-being.”

❯ How to get control of your time – “You wake up at 7:00 and reflexively reach for your phone. Between the stream of emails, WhatsApps and breaking news alerts, you see a worrying reminder: you averaged 11 hours of daily screen time last week. You swipe the notification away and open TikTok, where a woman in a matching athleisure set and glossy, slicked-back ponytail urges you to “get ready with me for my 5-9 before my 9-5”. You think about getting out of bed for a workout or meditation before you start answering those emails. But before you know it, it’s 8:57 – and if you don’t get off the apps and onto your computer, you’ll be late.”

❯ What Type of Experimentalist Are You? – “How do you respond to uncertainty? Do you jump straight into action, carefully analyze the situation first, or perhaps spend time imagining all the potential outcomes? We all face new challenges, but each of us tends to navigate these experiences differently, in ways that can reveal fascinating insights about our relationship with uncertainty, change, and growth.”

❯ The Future Is Too Easy – “There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it. The air is all wrong, there's simultaneously too much in it and not enough of it. Everyone I spoke to about the Consumer Electronics Show before I went to it earlier this month kept describing it in terms that involved wetness in some way. I took this as a warning, which I believe was the spirit in which it was intended, but I felt prepared for it. Your classically damp commercial experiences have a sort of terroir to them, a signature that marks a confluence of circumstances and time- and place-specific appetites; I have carried with me for decades the peculiar smell, less that of cigarette smoke than cigarette smoke in hair, that I remember from a baseball card show at a Ramada Inn that I attended as a kid. Only that particular strain of that particular kind of commerce, at that moment, gave off that specific distress signal. It was the smell of a living thing, and the dampness in the (again, quite damp) room was in part because that thing was breathing, heavily.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

In case you are looking for simple and lightweight apps that help you convert, resize, edit, and optimize images with ease, make sure to check out Tiny macOS utility apps I love – Part 5, in which I wrote about three apps that help you with mentioned workflows.

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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