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.

This week's newsletter is sponsored by Griff Foxley, coaching creatives and consulting entrepreneurs towards holistic success.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 295 👋

I have not shard an update about or on Priductive, the directory of privacy-focused, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted productivity apps I maintain, in a while. The reasons for that are that I have been focusing a lot on writing, shipping some updates to my personal website, and most importantly, getting another side-project of mine ready to launch.

Although I have a bunch of side-projects that I am working on irregularly, I do not feel overwhelmed by them, at least not anymore. There was a time I clearly felt overwhelmed, as I tried to persuade myself that I have to work on everything at the same time. I now have a way healthier relationship with my side-projects, and I have not had as much fun working on all of them as I do right now. Sometimes, that means that I am not able to touch a specific side-project for some time, however, that is fine, as it does not mean I abandoned it, but rather I enjoy working on other more.

Side-projects should be fun and not a burden.

And now, enjoy this week's newsletter.

Tiny macOS utility apps I love - Part 5

This is part 5 of my Tiny macOS utility apps I love series. Here you can find: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

In the third part of Tiny macOS utility apps I love, I wrote about and gathered three apps with a dedicated focus on lightweight, simple, and minimal note-taking and text companion apps. For the fifth part of this post series, I decided again on a specific focus, image editing and converting.

As a designer who publishes online, I have specific and high standards when it comes to the visual aspect of my posts, i.e. the thumbnails or any kind of imagery used within the posts. Working with and handling a lot of different assets can sometimes be a bit tedious. Sometimes, you need to make sure to compress loads of images and optimize them for your website, or you need to be able to quickly convert them into various formats. Therefore, having a simple and handy app at your fingertips, that allows you bulk edit images, is a powerful thing to have as part of your toolstack.

I gathered three lovely, beautifully-designed, simple, and powerful image editing apps, aimed at helping you quickly converting, resizing, compressing, renaming, and even applying filters to a batch of images. Let us get into it.

Read the whole post here:

Tiny macOS utility apps I love – Part 5
The fifth part of my tiny macOS utility apps I love focuses on three apps that help you convert, resize, edit, optimize images with ease.
CreativerlyPhilipp Temmel

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Fresh Updates & News

Scrintal's Playground for the Mind is here →

Some of you might know, that I am working as a Product Designer at Scrintal, and some of you probably also know that I do not like to use Creativerly as a mouthpiece for my corporate work, as those are two different worlds that I like to keep separated. Therefore, you are probably wondering why I am breaking this rule of mine today, right? Well, throughout the last eleven months, we revamped Scrintal, did a lot of research, rethought our vision and what drives our work, and ultimately came up with a new product, that offers a joyful and lovely experience. We call it the Playground for the Mind, and it is available now.

Initially, Scrintal was what visual PKM tool probably describes best. As more and more apps launched in that space, we felt the need for innovation. Placing notes on a canvas and connecting them with each other is exciting, but it is just a single interaction of a much broader creative process. No matter what you are working on or what you want to create, that something consists of multiple blocks. A quick thought here, a screenshot there, files, videos, notes, todos, lists, web links ... all of that is part of the creative process of shaping ideas. Unfortunately, loads of tools nowadays forced us to split up that process, scattered across multiple apps, ultimately disrupting our work. At Scrintal, we experienced this first-hand. So, we set out to build a tool that amplifies your creativity, is easy-to-use, delivers a fun and joyful experience, and encourages you to have fun while thinking.

That tool is live now, and we only got started, there are so many ideas how we want to further shape Scrintal. Today, Scrintal gives you access to an infinite canvas on which you can freely place blocks. A block can be a paragraph, a headline, an image, a video, a list, or anything else that supports your thinking. The lovely thing about it is that it supports your thinking process, which can be messy sometimes, as you can freely place those elements, however if you move on with your project, you might want to have more structure, and a better organization, and you can achieve that with Scrintal too. Just move one block closer to another and gather them in a container. In case you want to make that group of blocks, ideas, thoughts, images, whatsoever, part of your library, it needs a single click to create a doc from them. A doc can be referenced and linked to, giving you the possibility to build up your knowledge base. Oh, and you can use that doc in multiple places, since, did I mention that you are not limited to one canvas in Scrintal, but you can rather create boards to manage your projects, ideas, trips, hobbies, reading lists, and more.

Head over to Scrintal's website to get some more insights, check out this video by Bianca Pereira sharing a sneak peek of some of Scrintal's features, and join our Coming Soon page, as Scrintal is launching on Product Hunt on October 15th (psst, users who join via Product Hunt will get a 7-day free trial).

Play 2.0 - faster, easier, and more powerful →

Play's newest release introduces new advanced features, a simplified UI, and a platform for designers and engineers to fully realize product ideas together. With Play 2.0, you get access to new features like variables, conditions, loops, new triggers and actions, but also major performance and stability improvements. To install Play 2.0, you need to head over to the macOS and iOS App Stores, as it got released through new apps. The 1.0 version of Play will still be supported and you can continue using it for your current projects. However, in a couple of weeks, a planned update will give you the option to import any project you might have started on the current, 1.0 version fo Play.

End of road for Google Drive in Transmit →

In Creativerly 293, I wrote about iA Writer taking their Android app offline, because of some mind-boggling shenanigans at Google and their API policy changes. Two weeks later, and Panic, the company behind apps like Nova, and popular handheld game system playdate, announced that at some unknown point in the future, Google will revoke Transmit's, a macOS file transfer app developed by Panic, acces to Google Drive.

The story here is similar to what has happened to iA Writer's Android app. As Google has a new set of policies that requires apps that connect to Google Drive to go through expensive, time-consuming annual reviews, it has become extremely difficult for Panic to reasonable maintain Google Drive access in Transmit.

Height 2.0 →

One year in the making, Height just announced its 2.0 version, introducing an experience that has been built from the ground up, and with AI integrated deep into the product. Height 2.0 now comes with project intelligence across the entire workspace. It tracks your project progress, write your updates, clean up your lists, everything happens automatically.

Height's new autonomous features now handle things like backlog upkeep, spec updates, and bug triage. To get a full image and a demo by Michaël Villar, CEO and founder of Height, make sure to head over to the linked blog post.

Mental Wealth

❯ Instead of Being Cynical, Try Becoming Skeptical – “When I describe “cynics,” you might conjure up a certain type of person: the toxic, smirking misanthrope, oozing contempt. But they are not a fixed category, like New Zealanders or anesthesiologists. Cynicism is a spectrum. We all have cynical moments, or in my case, cynical years. The question is why so many of us end here even if it hurts us.”

❯ The Resistance List – “One of the most productive habits I’ve developed in a long time is to do something I’m mentally resisting every single day. I keep these items on my “resistance list” in a ritual that I think of as “resistance training.””

❯ How the buildings you occupy might be affecting your brain – “Have you ever experienced a space that made you feel uneasy or stressed? Perhaps it was a noisy and crowded shopping mall, with its neon signs, patterned tilework and boldly painted walls in franchise signature colours. Or the poorly lit work carpark with flickering fluorescent lighting, low ceilings and hard concrete surfaces that made your every footstep echo. Now contrast that experience with a space that made you feel at ease. It might have been that time you were sitting at the table in your friend’s kitchen – the sun coming in through the window, warming your skin and filling the space with light; the smell of fresh coffee brewing; and the first blush of colour in the buds of the pot plants on the windowsill. Or maybe it was sitting in your favourite spot at the local library – the comfy seat in the quiet area with the high ceilings, ample natural light and a view out over the courtyard garden.”

❯ On startup culture – “My friend sent me a post by a guy who works at a semi-local startup. In it, he talks about how tough but rewarding it is to be a part of a demanding, fast-moving, chaotic startup. He confirms what many in the tech community here have assumed for years: that the people who work there get paid less to do more in a stress-filled environment with constantly changing priorities and directives from management.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

The world of productivity software is ever-evolving, with users constantly hunting for the perfect tool. This phenomenon, dubbed 'half-life productivity software', reflects our tendency to switch tools frequently. But what drives this cycle of adoption and abandonment? Read more about it in my post about Half-life Productivity Software.

❯ Quick Bits

Thank you to the sponsor of this issue, Griff Foxley, coaching creatives and consulting entrepreneurs towards holistic success.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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