My new personal website & The internet is about to get weird again

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 255 👋

First of all, I want to wish everyone a happy new year as this is the first Creativerly issue of 2024, a new year packed with new opportunities.

I am kicking off the year with the launch of my new personal website, philipptemmel.com. For quite some time, my personal website did not receive the attention it deserved. Throughout 2023, I have been working on and off on my personal website, but haven’t reached a state in which I felt confident enough to push through and finish it, especially since I switched back and forth between different website builders. As my web development knowledge is too limited to build a website like I designed it, I am relying on visual website builders which became quite powerful as of recently.

During the final third of 2023, I settled with Framer. While I did use Webflow before, I had the feeling that I got the hang of Framer way faster, which gave me the possibility to build the layouts I had designed beforehand. I had the basics of my new website ready, but ultimately during the last two days before New Year‘s Eve, I found myself with a completely empty calendar, as all the family events were behind me. Therefore, I decided that those two should be dedicated to making my website ready for launch.

Fast-forward to today, and my website is alive and published. There are still some missing bits, and some elements and areas need to get a bit more polished, but I am happy with the current state, therefore I decided to publish it anyway and add the missing pieces incrementally.

My personal website is my tiny home on the internet, where I showcase my passions and who I am. The most important thing for me was to have a place to finally get back to blogging and writing. To celebrate the launch of my website, I already published two blog posts, a story about my tiny home on the internet and my App Defaults. You can be sure that more posts will follow soon. If you would like to keep up with what is happening on my personal website, thoughts and ideas about design and tech, interesting links, and my writings, you can sign up to my personal newsletter, Datest, which I am writing casually.

I am excited to finally having my personal website alive and published, I am looking forward to constantly updating and maintaining it. Since I can now check off yet another focused project from my list, it is time heading to next one.

Apps, Software, Tools

Echonotes →

Echonotes is the first notes app with a straight focus on transforming your voice to text instantly, and by doing that organizing ideas into clear and structured notes. If you ever wanted to say goodbye to time-consuming note-taking, you should try out Echonotes, which gives you the possibility to simply speak your thoughts, and watch its AI efficiently transcribing and organizing them for you.

One of the goals of Echonotes is to streamline your note-taking experience by transforming your voice, getting AI-powered assistance, and easily switch between various text formats, all with seamless cloud accessibility. Echonotes powerful voice transcription lets you convert spoken words into text, fast and easy. Thanks to flexible formatting you can transform notes into various structured formats. Echonotes AI integration lets you engage with AI for smarter note enhancement. With Echonotes versatile editor, you can freely modify text. There are multiple use cases for which Echonotes can help you streamlining everyday tasks. When you are keeping track of meeting notes, Echonotes lets you record team discussions and easily generate meeting notes. For creating creative drafts, Echonotes can assist you while dictating stories or articles for immediate text drafts. Additionally, you can speak to set reminders or to-do lists for personal organization. When you are conducting research interviews, Echonotes allows you to transcribe recorded interviews for quick references and analysis. In case your are seeking to streamline your study notes, Echonotes will give you the possibility to convert lectures or study sessions into written notes for review.

Echonotes is a powerful and versatile notes app, giving you access to various use-cases and workflows. Its AI-powered transcription offers high accuracy, effectively capturing your spoken words and converting them into text with minimal errors. All the notes that have been transcribed can easily be edited and formatted with Echonotes built-in text editor, allowing for full customization and refinement of the transcribed text. What makes Echonotes even more powerful is the fact that it supports multiple languages, to get the full list, make sure to head over to its website.

Echonotes is offering a free version which gives users access to up to three minutes of voice transcription per note, up to ten notes, and access to some text formatting features.

This is an affiliate link to support Creativerly. If you are interested in putting your tool, product, or resource in front of over 2000 creative minds, consider advertising in Creativerly and book a sponsor or classified ad spot. Find all the important information at creativerly.com/advertise.

Fresh Updates & News

Amie →

Amie started the new year with a lovely new update which added support for syncing todos with Things, the highly popular task management app from Cultured Code. Thanks to the Things integration within Amie you can now pick and choose projects to sync, or you can simply select all your projects to sync from Things to Amie.

As of writing this, Amie does not supported syncing date based lists like „Today“ or „Upcoming“ or syncing todos created in Amie back to Things. If those are features you would like to see within Amie, make sure to get in contact with them and express your interest.

InVision →

Back in November 2023, InVision announced that its whiteboard tool, Freehand, got acquired by Miro. On January 4th, 2024, Michael Shenkman, the CEO of InVision announced in a blog post that at the end of the year InVision‘s design collaboration services (including prototypes, DSM, etc) will get shut down. This means that InVision as we knew it before will no longer exist. It will be exciting what will happen with the whole company after those announcements, how InVision will reshape their focuses, and if the company will actually continuing operating.

Hey Calendar →

The team behind Hey Email has been working on a new calendar app, but as they tried to launch it on the App Store, Apple blocked the app. A proper deja-vu, since Hey Email has been blocked by Apple too in the past. The reason Apple is blocking Hey Calendar is the very same when they blocked Hey Email in the past: Hey Calendar is basically an app that does not let you anything with it until you use an external paid service, which is a Hey subscription. With that practice, 37Signals, the company behind Hey, tries to circumvent Apple’s 30% App Store fee.

I have mixed feelings about those news. First of all, I am not a fan of 37Signals and especially David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), co-founder of the company, as he has proved multiple times what a bad person he is. Besides that, there have been multiple controversies at Basecamp (the main digital product developed by 37Signals), which led to a huge deflation of the company. DHH probably enjoys all the publicity he gets from Apple yet again blocking on of their apps. But at the same time it is worth pointing out that Apple decided to block a totally legit business model (Netflix is doing the exact same thing and lives happily on the App Store).

DHH surely knew that this would happen again, as they did the exact same thing when they launched Hey Email, so maybe it is all for publicity again, we do not know.

Kagi →

Kagi has been one of the most promising and powerful Google Search alternatives as of recently. The company has also been building a browser called Orion, which attracted an increasing number of users because its privacy first approach. Last week, a disgusting story unfolded at the company. Kagi agreed to a partnership with Brave, to power Kagi’s search results with Brave’s API. Brave has been founded by Brendan Eich, a prominent and notorious anti-gay rights supporter.

Within Kagi’s forum, loads of users expressed their concerns about this partnership. Vlad Prelovac, founder and CEO at Kagi, joined in on the discussion, but his reaction to his users’ concern was equally disgusting. He mentioned that he and his company is primarily in the business of search and they would like to stay focused on that. Basically, he framed the situation as it would only be about the technology, while in fact it is one of the most reprehensible decisions to still partner with a company, when you know that its CEO has been publicly stating that people of the same gender should not be allowed to get married, among other things.

Vlad Prelovac knew that, but he still decided to partner with Brave, because of its technology. If he truly wants to build the best search and provide the best web results, it would honor him if he would work for that, but he took the hideous shortcut of collaborating with a homophobe man, just because of getting access to some sort of technology.

It seems like numerous users and subscribers of Kagi have since cancelled their support and stopped using the service.

Mental Wealth

❯ The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again – “IT’S A DRAMATIC, messy era on the internet. Everything is changing rapidly. There’s broad dissatisfaction with the dominant search engine, and activists are worried about the privacy implications of increasingly intrusive online surveillance. While investors prattle on about esoteric topics like digital currencies and virtual reality, back in the real world, users are concerned with how hard it is to message all their friends on the many different platforms that they’re using, and perhaps a bit curious about the new social networks that keep popping up. Amidst the backdrop of all this change, an off-putting nerd named Elon Musk won’t stop talking about an “everything app” called X that will help him manifest his extremist views. But more than anything, it is a time when the internet seems ripe for change, perhaps even being wide open to a new cohort of technologies and communities that could reshape the way it works. Millions of people seem poised to connect with each other in new ways, as they reconsider their fundamental relationship to technology”

❯ How to Create So Much They Can’t Ignore You – “Isn’t the Internet great? Never in human history have we had a better tool for getting our creative work in front of more people. I’m now able to draw a picture on my iPad, and instantly share it to thousands via Twitter and Instagram. I may even pick up a few likes.”

❯ Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: How to Change Your Mind – “Psychoanalysis, pioneered by Sigmund Freud, dominates popular impressions of therapy. Patients lying down on long couches while an analyst dissects their dreams for evidence of repressed childhood trauma make for great television, but does it actually work?”

❯ 5 Useful Heuristics for Quick Decision-Making in Daily Situations – “The average human makes a whopping 35,000 decisions per day. Should you get up? Or sleep in? Go to work? Or quit and move to the wilderness chopping wood all day? Most decisions may be minor, and we make them unconsciously. Still, it would be insane to go through a structured, rational decision-making process every time we face a more significant choice throughout the day. This is where heuristics come in, rules of thumb that are crucial to navigating an uncertain world full of options.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

If you are on the hunt for privacy-focused, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted productivity apps and tools, head over to ProductivePrivacy and browse through a packed directory full of apps that respect your privacy. No matter if you are looking for note-taking, task management, or project management apps, ProductivePrivacy got you covered.

❯ Quick Bits

• Ivanti warns of critical vulnerability in its popular line of endpoint protection software
• Discontinued and unreleased Microsoft peripherals revived by licensing deal
• Android users could soon replace Google Assistant with ChatGPT
• Elon Musk drops price of X gold checks amid rampant crypto scams
• Tesla recalls more than 1.6 million cars in China over steering software issues
• Google Chrome starts blocking data tracking cookies
• Publish Nazi newsletters on your platform, Substack, and you will rightly be damned
• How the Ukrainian startup behind astrology app Nebula is thriving despite the war

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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