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 296 👋

I am keeping this intro section as short as possible this week. The reason for that is that I am currently on a lovely trip with my partner because of my birthday, and I do not want to spend too much time in front of my MacBoook.

Therefore, enjoy this week's newsletter and post.

What matters most when choosing a note-taking app?

Three years ago, it definitely felt like we reached the peak of note-taking and personal knowledge management software. We are getting flooded with new apps and software constantly, however, back then it seemed like loads of people and companies are only focusing on building the next big thing when it comes to note-taking. Suddenly, everyone was writing, journaling, taking notes, and creating loads of bi-directional links. People created systems to manage knowledge, courses to master apps popped up everywhere, but ultimately we experienced a hype, as the whole topic of note-taking and personal knowledge management saw only a temporary surge in popularity and interest. Apparently, people thought something magical will happen if they just connect their notes and link between them. However, to get the most out of your notes, additional work is obviously needed.

The buzz around note-taking apps flattened. People stuck with apps, others abandoned them, and some are still looking for the perfect solution. While the latter is subjective to everyones' needs, the question what matters most when choosing a note-taking app can be answered in a more general way.

During the hype of note-taking software, people were always looking for the next app that will perfect their system. In reality, that was often just procrastination from doing the actual creative and challenging work of writing, note-taking, and journaling. People were chasing apps and systems, rather than focusing on the things that matter. I have been there too, and pretty much tried out every single shiny new note-taking app that launched over the course of last couple of years. And instead of doing the actually work, which is taking notes, journaling, and writing, I found myself tinkering around with systems that looked cool, but ultimately they did not help me with the above, as I got stuck building and evolving the system. That process repeated itself, whenever I moved my notes from one app to another. I do not even want to think about how much notes I lost while doing that multiple times.

It was time to stop doing that and settle with one app for writing, note-taking, and journaling. Easier said then done, since there were so many options available, it is hard to settle with one. When I got confronted with that decision, I wanted to think through it, so I do not choose one app, just to realize a couple months later, another one would have been the better choice. And to do that, I asked myself what matters most to me when choosing a note-taking app?

Read the whole post here:

Remember everything. Organize nothing.

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Fresh Updates & News

Adobe announces Project Concept →

At Adobe MAX, Adobe yearly product conference, they announced Project Concept, a new AI-first product with the goal to help you transform early stages of your creative journey. Project Concept features a canvas that is packed with the latest capabilities from Adobe's Firefly Generative AI models to help you quickly explore potential artistic directions, mix images together, transform regions of an asset, and remix styles or backgrounds. It is multiplayer, collaborative, and will be integrated with Adobe Creative Cloud to make workflows with their other software offerings seamless.

What is really interesting is that Project Concept will respect the work of artists as it leverages Content Credentials technology to recognize the source of images, respect generative AI usage and training preferences, and promote transparency for how content was created. Besides that, Adobe announced that Adobe's Firefly generative AI models were trained responsibly on content that Adobe has a license to train on.

Project Concept is still in an early stage and will be released in a private beta in the near future.

Fable is winding down →

In a blog post published on October 15, Fable shared the bittersweet news, that they are going to wind down operations. Fable was a lovely platform and web app to design, animate, and compose incredible motion content with familiar tools and interfaces. Fable launched in 2019 with the goal to become the "Figma for motion", the "After Effects on the web", and the "Canva for creative pros". In my opinion, Fable pretty much delivered on all those claims.

According to the blog post, one reason that led to Fable winding down is that by the time they started to market Fable, AI was beginning to challenge the very nature of software itself, and their multi-modal bet with Prism (Fable's offering to design and animate in a real-time partnership with generative AI) was not enough to cut through. I have been a huge fan of Fable, they created a beautiful piece of software, so it is unfortunate seeing them shutting down.

Webflow acquires GSAP →

Webflow just announced the acquisition of GSAP, an industry standard JavaScript animation library which can be used to craft high-performance animations that work in every major browser. For quite some years, Webflow followed the mission to bring development superpowers to everyone. GSAP followed a similar mission, taking the complicated and making it simple. With GSAP you can pretty much animate anything, simply by writing some JavaScript.

Over the upcoming months, Webflow will be integrating GSAP into the platform so all customers can create GSAP animations as part of their projects natively within Webflow. Besides that, GSAP will continue to be publicly available for everyone to use outside of Webflow.

Mental Wealth

❯ Measure By Time, Not Output – “Author Jeffrey Archer flies out to Portugal each December to begin a seven-week writing marathon. Over the following few weeks, he will start writing at 6:00 am and will write throughout the day every day. At the end of those few weeks, he will have the first draft of his next book written.”

❯ A Roadmap to Befriending the Mind – “Extensive research has explored our role as active agents in our own flourishing. In 2020, Cortland Dahl and colleagues from UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds introduced a multi-disciplinary, training-based framework featuring four psychological pathways for cultivating well-being: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. These dimensions, the authors argue, can be developed through various mental training methods, highlighting the plasticity of human flourishing.”

❯ The wrong way to define productivity – “Every week, I talk with executive teams about internal debates about issues like flexibility, remote work and productivity. Inevitably, as we get around to the root of their challenges somewhere in the back half of the session, someone finally says it: “Our real problem is that we don’t trust each other.” The biggest driver of productivity at work today isn’t about the remote-versus-office tug-of-war, or generative AI. It’s trust.”

❯ The Flow State: Definition, Benefits, And How To Achieve It – “Have you ever been so absorbed in an activity that time just seemed to melt away? When you’re deeply focused on a challenging task that you have enough skill to complete, and the activity is rewarding for its own sake, you can enter a state that psychologists call the ‘flow state’. You might know it as just being ‘in the zone’.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

A lot of people are suffering from shiny-app-syndrome, which means they are signing up to every single new app that pops up somewhere. That phenomenon is especially visible in the field of productivity software, which is interesting, since switching apps over and over again definitely makes us not more productive. Half-life productivity software is a thing, and I am diving into the topic in one of my most-recent posts. Check it out.

❯ Quick Bits

• OpenAI unveils experimental ‘Swarm’ framework, igniting debate on AI-driven automation (Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat)
• Meta suggests AI Northern Lights pics are as good as the real thing (Wes Davis / The Verge)
• Hackers took over robovacs to chase pets and yell slurs (Wes Davis / The Verge)
• Ex-Twitter execs push for $200M severance as Elon Musk runs X into ground (Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica)
• Boeing to lay off 17,000 employees to 'stay competitive' (Mariella Moon / Engadget)
• Temu gets more questions from the EU about illegal product risks (Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch)
• Google to buy nuclear power for AI datacentres in ‘world first’ deal (Alex Laweson / The Guardian)
• Indonesia orders Apple, Google to take down Chinese bargain app Temu (Laura Dobberstein / The Register)
• WordPress saga escalates as WP Engine plugin forcibly forked and legal letters fly (Simon Sharwood / The Register)
• The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved web pages are back online (Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica)
• The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe (Morgan Meaker / Wired)
• Perplexity lets you search your internal enterprise files and the web (Emilia David / VentureBeat)

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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