The artist and the inner retreat & Maneken is live

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 283 👋

It feels like I am almost back at my usual publishing schedule. This week, I got down with the newsletter in time, and I was able to prepare quite a lot of stuff already during the week. Although, I feel a bit sluggish because of the incredible hot weather, I created and wrote a new newsletter issue, I am really proud of. I had fun writing this week's piece, and gathered some really exciting news and updates.

I am celebrating this small win and hope that it will continue like that.

Have fun reading this week's newsletter!

Create a website, blog, or portfolio using only Apple Notes - with Montaigne

There are multiple lovely services available that allow everyone to set up a blog or website with ease and start publishing online. For example, Bear Blog is a privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform, Pika is a pretty, easy blogging platform from the folks at Good Enough, Telescope is a publishing platform with a focus on simplicity, speed, and privacy, and they all allow you to get started with a simple blog and publish your notes and thoughts.

People are capturing and writing down their notes and thoughts in all kinds of apps. Therefore, it is crucial being able to move whatever you have written from your preferred writing environment to the editor that powers your blog, with ease. Montaigne is a service that streamlines this process, as it is powered by Apple Notes.

With Monataigne you can create and set up a blog, website, or portfolio only by using Apple Notes. In case you are using Apple Notes to capture your notes and thoughts, and write your blog posts, and feel the urge to publish those to the vastness of the internet, you should take a closer look at Montaigne.

I started publishing my thoughts and ideas online over seven years ago, and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. It helped me building up a writing habit, by becoming a better writer I became a better thinker, I connected with other creative minds and brands, and landed my current job. Those are just my personal experiences, there are countless more benefits of writing and publishing online. It is always the right time to start a blog and have a personal internet corner. To get started with that, I appreciate tools and services like Montaigne.

Now let us take a closer look at Montaigne.

Read the full post here:

Discover the Best in Design Weekly!

This is a paid promotion 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

Mastodon: highlighting journalism →

Mastodon recently introduced a new feature for media organizations, journalists, and bloggers. There are still a lot of journalists, media organizations, and publishers are active on X. To encourage them to switch over to Mastodon and reinforce it as the go-to place for journalism, Mastodon introduced a feature that highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse. Underneath the links to posts, you will find an author byline that can be clicked on to open the author's associated fediverse account, right in the app.

With that feature, you can discover writers and journalists easier than ever, and directly follow them to keep up with their work. Websites like The Verge, MacStories, and MacRumors already adopted this feature. Accounts that are running on mastodon.social and using the web version or the official Mastodon apps, will see associated fediverse accounts underneath the articles, no matter who posts them. Since this feature is part of Mastodon's API, it can be expected that there will soon be support among the vast array of third party apps for Mastodon.

Private Browsing 2.0 in Safari →

Apple believes that users should not be tracked across the web without their knowledge or their consent. Therefore, they invented Private browsing back in 2005. Over the last 20 years, they increased privacy protections incrementally. In Safari 17.0, Apple added a whole new level of privacy protections to Private Browsing, and they enhanced it even further in Safari 17.2 and Safari 17.5. To get a full overview of how Apple enhanced web privacy in Safari and what Private Browsing is in a nutshell, check out the linked blog post.

Blogstatic introduces DesignStudio →

Blogstatic is a lovely, simple, and easy way to set up a blog and start publishing your thoughts online. It is a powerful, no-code, fully-customizable, SEO-ready, and fast-loading solution, that starts at as low as $19 per year. The most recent blogstatic update introduces DesignStudio, which gives you even more control when it comes to customizing your blog.

Thanks to DesignStudio, you get the chance to match a blogstatic theme to your overall brand, or an existing website to which you are attaching blogstatic. DesignStudio is an area within blogstatic where you can set custom colors for your blog, and select fonts that fit the style you are looking for. To get an in-depth look at DesinStudio head over to blogstatic.

Maneken Beta is live →

Maneken, the browser-based mockup editor, is now live in beta, which means you can sign up now and get access to their fast growing catalog of high-quality mockups. In case you sign up to the Pro Plan, you can use the promo code 1MONTHFREE at checkout to get access to it for free for one month.

Mental Wealth

❯ A Wasted Life – “One of my favourite poems is James Wright’s ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota' (Poetry Foundation). The poem is known in particular for its last line, “I have wasted my life”. Like the punchline to a joke, it hits the reader and encourages them to reevaluate everything they read leading up to it. Every time I read the poem in anticipation of that last line, in many ways reading backwards from it, like watching a film whose twist you’re already familiar with.”

❯ The artist and the inner retreat – “After recent reflections on the challenges we feel about needing to promote our work, we’ve come to better understand the pressure many of us feel. We’re stuck between modern ways and ancient wisdom. The modern world tells us to get out there and promote ourselves. Ancient wisdom speaks to the power of retreat. Retreat is how we discover enlightenment. We retreat from the boundaries of society to gain new ways to see.”

❯ Feedback is What Makes Everything Work – “The other day I closed a savings account at a tiny credit union branch. I expected it to take about five minutes, but the teller took so long that I started to experience time distortion. I knew it had been at least fifteen minutes, but perhaps it was much longer. Twenty-five minutes? Forty? There was no visible clock, and I didn’t want to take out my phone. The young teller seemed to be Googling how to close an account while maintaining her professional bank teller countenance.”

❯ How to Create More Belonging for Yourself and Others – “Before a big, make-or-break presentation to shareholders, a rising employee in Silicon Valley was feeling nervous. Although her career was going well, it was still difficult to make it in a male-dominated industry, and she often felt like she didn’t belong.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

At Creativerly, I recently shipped a refresh that included a new website, restructured categories, updated pages, and more. I wrote a dedicated post that highlights all the why's and how's behind this refresh.

❯ Quick Bits

• Elon Musk’s X may succeed in blocking Calif. content moderation law on appeal
• OpenAI launches GPT-4o mini, which will replace GPT-3.5 in ChatGPT
• Mass IT outage affects airlines, media and banks
• Disney investigating massive leak of internal messages
• Russia antivirus firm Kaspersky quits US after ban
• Meta will withhold multimodal AI models from the EU amid regulatory uncertainty
• An AI mafia is forming before our eyes: Here's the definitive map
• The number of data breach victims is up 490% in the first half of 2024
• ByteDance has to keep the EU's gatekeeper label under the Digital Markets Act
• Elon Musk’s X tests letting users request Community Notes on bad posts
• Scam warning as fake emails and websites target users after outage
• GPs use AI to boost cancer detection rates in England by 8%
• We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny
• Proton launches ‘privacy-first’ AI email assistant to rival Google, Microsoft

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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