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 310 👋

A couple of days ago, I sat down quite early in the morning, felt incredibly energized and motivated to do a deep writing session, however, after a short amount of time, I already hit a wall. Instead of forcing myself any longer to try and get the words out of my head, I got up from my desk, put on my jacket and my shoes, and headed out for a walk to spend some time outside, and get some fresh air.

After 1 1/2 hours, I came back, and with me I had 6 more ideas for a post I am working on, as well as I felt refreshed and energized again. So, I got back in front of my desk, but instead of hitting the wall as earlier that day, my fingers were knocking over my mechanical keyboard without a break. Suddenly, I was able to knock out words and thoughts with ease. It probably sound mundane, but my biggest hack to refresh, generate ideas, and energize is doing walks outside. And chances are high, I am not the first one telling you this, but sparkling your days with short walks (you do not have to do 1 1/2 hours every time) whenever you feel like you are getting stuck with a project can do wonders. Even super short walks like walking around the block can have an immense impact on your creative work.

And while I love listening to music, podcasts, or audiobook when I am outside, explicitly not listening to anything besides the natural sounds around you while walking feels even more magical, as you start perceive your surroundings more intensively, which is a great source for inspiration.

There is no need to force yourself to be creative, starring into a screen, just to end up abandoning what you have been working on. The next time you experience this, try to head out for a walk.

And now, enjoy this week's newsletter.

Fresh Updates & News

Vivaldi ships 7.1 update to kick-off 2025 →

With its 7.1 update, Vivaldi releases new ways to customize your experience, simplify your workflows, and getting more control over the browser you use. This update introduces a new Weather Widget, which can be pinned to your Dashboard, so you can get real-time updates for your location or any place you choose. Speaking of the Dashboard, you are now able to the customize the look of your widgets with new background styles, as well as in case you like to tinker, web widgets can now pull colors from your Vivaldi theme to perfectly integrate them with the rest of your browser.

If you are planning to switch to Vivaldi from a different browser, the new Import Open Tabs feature makes this switch easier, as it lets you bring your active tabs from another browser directly into Vivaldi. Vivaldi's Speed Dials feature acts like a personal launchpad for the web, and with this update adding a new website to the Speed Dial is faster and more intuitive, as Vivaldi added a dedicated Add Speed Dial dialog. A small but important update is the introduction of more default search engines. You can now choose between Startpage, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, and Qwant, as well as you are still able to add your preferred search engines manually.

Check the linked blog post for the full release notes.

Mammoth and sub.club shutting down →

So, this one slipped a bit through my fingers since it already happened/got announced in December 2024, but I think it's a crucial thing to point out and reflect on: The third-party Mastodon client Mammoth, and fediverse creator monetization tool sub.club are both shutting down, as they ran out of funding. Initially, Mammoth was founded and built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, who is known for multiple apps (like Vinyls, Bulletin, Globetrotter, etc.) which he regularly sells (and it seems like he wants to sell his whole current suite of apps too). According to some reports, a company led by Bart Decrem (who has a background in open source, consumer apps, and entrepreneurship) acquired Mammoth and shortly after that Mozilla became the principal investor, leading Mammoth's pre-seed funding.

As Bart Decrem took over Mammoth, he founded sub.club, a Fediverse creator payment platform with the idea to let users on ActivityPub-based platforms (like Mastodon) offer paid subscriptions and premium content while taking a 6% cut in addition to payment processing fees. Both, Mammoth and sub.club were built and maintained by the same developer team.

Now, both are shutting down. The reason, I want to reflect on this a bit is after the first wave of the fediverse boom, Mozilla was at the forefront and showed its interest but now they backtracked significantly from that endeavor. They shut down Mozilla.social instance, which launched in December 2022, operated on a fork of Mastodon and used Elk as a more user-friendly frontend, and acted as a community hub. And now, they no longer pursue their investments to help build apps and tools that fuel the Fediverse. The change and prioritisation came with a leadership transition at the executive level at Mozilla, as Laura Chambers stepped in as CEO of The Mozilla Corporation, and quickly began shifting the focus of the whole company onto AI. Shortly after this transition, Mozilla laid off 60 people who have been working on Moziall.social.

I hope that Mozilla backtracking from its engagement in the Fediverse does not influence other endeavors. It does raise the question though how long-term sustainable other Fediverse instances, like the ones operated by Vivaldi, Medium, or Flipboard are.

Capacities introduces full offline mode →

The first big update of 2025 for Capacities brought one of the most requested and long-awaited features, Offline support. This has been in the making for a while, and not it is finally here. Capacities is now offline-first, which means you can work offline and your changes will get synchronized as soon as you are back online. Once you logged into your account, Capacities will automatically download all your notes to your device. This means, all changes you make to your notes are stored locally, and will be synchronized with the cloud once you are online again. Within the settings, you can check the offline and sync state. Besides that, you can also select in the same settings whether you want to download media files to your device.

You can choose between the options 'Everything' which will download all media files to your device, so you can access and view them while being offline, and 'Required only' which will only download media files that are required to display your notes. With this setting selected, some of the images, files, and videos within your notes might not be available when being offline. However, this setting saves storage space on your device.

Mental Wealth

❯ How to Build a Healthier Relationship With Your Screen – “Whether it’s for work, convenience, connection or entertainment, we rely on digital technology. But the prevailing wisdom is that our screen-based lives are not good for us—that our digital devices and apps are addictive and harmful, wrecking attention span, sleep, and more. However, research suggests screen time isn’t actually the driving force behind declines in mental health. Instead, digital technology is one component within an ecosystem of factors.”

❯ Why human creativity matters in the age of AI – “In Roald Dahl’s short story ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’, an inventor named Adolph Knipe constructs a novel-writing machine. Knipe’s fantastical and perhaps excessively gothic contraption can be manipulated by various pedals, levers and organ stops to produce detective stories, historical fiction, Westerns, tales of the sea and so on – in the style of Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce or whoever you like. The Grammatizator’s owners plot to supplant the world’s novelists – ‘squeeze ’em out’, ‘exactly like Rockefeller did with his oil companies’, one of them enthuses. This being a Dahl story – and therefore dark and cynical – the plan is a virtually unqualified success. Dahl writes that in ‘the first full year of the machine’s operation it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator’.”

❯ Rethinking Goals: the Science of Nonlinear Goal Setting – “In 2008, Spotify set the ambitious vision to create a legal music streaming service that could compete with piracy. Their initial strategy was clear-cut: secure licensing deals with major record labels, build a robust platform, and acquire users.”

❯ 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.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

The reality behind personal knowledge management: why complex productivity systems fail, how true note-taking thrives, and what remains when the hype fades. In my post Systems Over Substance, I take a critical look at the PKM landscape.

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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