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 356 👋

For the first time since working full-time, I took off two weeks during Christmas season and New Year's. This year, I decided to completely log off from work, instead of dragging myself between public holidays and work days, while also trying to keep myself motivated and energized. Today is actually the first day of my vacation, and it already felt so great not touching my work MacBook at all, but rather wake up because my body got enough actual sleep, instead of waking up to the sound of my alarm clock, having breakfast in bed, watch some Netflix and some videos on YouTube, heading out for a winter bike ride (love those), ordering my favorite food, and writing the final words for this newsletter while laying in bed with a cup of tea.

I am also planning to use my vacation to "work" a bit on my side-projects. Those things do not feel like work to me, as I truly enjoy the time fiddling around with them. Whenever I have a full day of writing posts for Creativerly or my personal blog, or designing and developing my own apps ahead of me, I get reminded that it would be a dream of mine to be able to focus on those things full-time, instead of working at a huge company where I help shareholders to become even more richer. I still like to design, but I am also realizing more and more, that there are other things I enjoy more. Especially, working as a designer in tech has been exhausting over the past couple of months. There is this hyped-up race to implement AI everywhere, and even companies' forcing their employees to use AI in their day-to-day work.

Anyway, today was a great day, and I do not want to ruin that by talking or thinking too much about work.

Well, we are close to wrap up the year, so I wish you a lovely festive season ahead, and the next time Creativerly lands in your inbox, it will be the last newsletter of 2025.

All the best.

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Fresh Updates, news, and findings

Bento is shutting down →

Bento has redefined the "link-in-bio" by providing users with a creative way of setting up widgets to represent whatever creative work they were doing. Two years ago, Bento got acquired by Linktree, and a lot of users expected already what is now becoming reality: Bento is shutting down on February 13th, 2026.

"...the time has come for Bento to walk into the sunset." – writes co-founder, and CTO Mugeeb Hassan in the announcement blog post. And I am just wondering, why people out there are still creating software, and tools with a termination date. There are chances, that as part of the acquistion, it was already clear that there will be a day on which Bento has to shut down. Linktree acquired a competitor which grew massively in popularity. And in the weird world we are living, the only logical thing to do in such a situation is to throw a ton of money at the founders of the competitor, acquiring the product that is causing you harm, stop shipping updates after a grace period, so chances are high that users are migrating over to the other service, and then you are fine with shutting down services.

It is always fascinating how thankful the founders of the acquired companies are for their users, and how they kept them motivated to build the product, improve it, and that those users were the driving force for the company's creativity, yet when enough money lands on the table, nothing else matters anymore. I will never get that.

Grila is a macOS calendar app for keyboard shortcut addicts →

Grila is one of the most recent apps I have discovered while browsing online. Grila is a keyboard-driven calendar app for macOS, that features a cozy interface, without all the fuss and buzz, but yet offers versatility to stay on top of your events. There are a bunch of opinionated design decision, like hearing a quiet chine sound on every hour, or the fact that the calendar is read-only, which means Grila can not and will not modify, add, or delete events in your calendars, and reminders lists. Super interesting personal calendar app, that got me intrigued.

Mental Wealth

❯ What Made Blogging Different? – “Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest hits and biggest misses, but the early ‘00s were what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (Talking Points Memo was started in 2000.)”

❯ Our creative life – “When we compare where we were a year ago to where we are now, it's easier to see what’s changed than what’s stayed the same. This is what mystics call being. Being is dynamic. Being is unpredictable. Being does not fit into a pre-defined box.”

❯ Embrace friction – “This weekend, I attended a letterpress course at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. I love working with and reading about typography, but until now, most of my interactions with type have been mediated through a digital display. I was thrilled to get physical. To touch the type!”

❯ How to show yourself compassion as a creative – “The creative industries have long romanticised struggle: the late nights, the tough love, the idea that suffering somehow produces brilliance. But what if the voice pushing you forward didn't need to be a bully? What if the thing that sustains your creativity long-term is kindness, not pressure?”

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These are paid promotions or affiliate links 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.

Appendix

❯ ICYMI

The corporate web is doomed, but the indieweb is thriving. The issue is though, the content which matters most gets buried in an ever-growing pool of AI slop. Traditional search engines like Google put AI-generated summaries and content, and ads first, authentic content gets pushed further down, hardly ever seen by potential visitors. Thankfully, there are already a bunch of alternative search engines, especially built to search through the indieweb, and surface personal websites, blogs, projects, and human writing. In my newest post Searching the indieweb: How to find real people, real projects, real writing in a sea of AI slop I gathered alternative search engines to browse through the indieweb.

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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