The illusion of productivity & The browser focusing on privacy

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 269 👋

Since my weekend was packed and I also got sick, there is no new long-form piece in this issue of Creativerly. I did manage to gather some news and updates, articles, and quick bits, but I simply had no energy left to write anything more than that.

I will now recharge my batteries and be back with the usual content within the next issue. Thank you for your understanding.

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Fresh Updates & News

Readwise Reader →

A couple months ago, I became a Readwise subscriber, mainly to capture highlights from the physical books I am reading to then bring them into my note-taking system. With the subscription, I also got access to Reader, which Readwise's RSS, web highlighting, read-it-later, newsletter, reading app. It features a beautiful design and truly lovely features for power readers.

In its recent public beta update #8, Readwise introduced RSS folders within the web app and the possibility to pin individual feeds to the left sidebar, text-to-speech functionality in the web and desktop apps, an improved full-text search, custom ghostreader summaries, resurfacing in summaries emails, email original styles, automatic PDF metadata, and a lot more.

Strut →

Strut, which entitles itself as the complete writing workspace, as it combines your notes, docs, and writing projects in collaborative workspaces by AI, just revealed a new look and introduced the next phase of the app. Strut now launched its new desktop app, shipped deep focus modes to unlock greater writing focus, shipped the inbox to write first and organize later, and implemented dark mode. More to come soon.

Superlist →

The newest Superlist update brought landscape mode for tablets, the possibility to search for tasks and list titles, an Unsplash integration to give users more ways to customize lists and the ability to upload images directly from Unsplash, and the possibility to select the Make (Superlist's AI integration) prompt from the block type selector, and accept pre-generated prompts simply by hitting Tab.

Next on the roadmap will be natural language processing, translating Superlist into more languages, a brand new in-product onboarding experience, and improved team discoverability and usability.

Vivaldi →

As we get flooded with browsers implementing one AI-powered feature after the other, I am thankful for companies and browsers like Vivaldi, who are keep working on features which are prioritizing privacy. In one of its newest updates, Vivaldi announced a new experimental feature called Privacy Guard in collaboration with Invisv. When Privacy Guard is turned on, all your web traffic will get encrypted and your IP address will get hidden from websites and services to which you are connecting. Based on that, it functions similarly to a VPN, but it differentiates from it in its architecture.

To learn more about it, what it does and how powerful it is, make sure to read the announcement blog post published by Vivaldi.

Mental Wealth

❯ The Illusion of Productivity: Why We Are Addicted to Busyness – “Ever since humans have learned to write, we have documented how special we are and how we differ from other animals. Imagination, morality, and culture are traits thought to only be found in humans. Another aspect that seems to be uniquely human is the need to keep busy. Most animals would be happy if their basic needs are met: food, shelter, rest. In contrast, we humans don’t like to stay idle. Even if it means falling prey to the illusion of productivity.”

❯ Take Ownership of Your Future Self – “In his TED Talk “The Psychology of Your Future Self,” Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert explains a bias that almost all of us have: We tend to think that the person we are today is the person we will always be.”

❯ I’m Finally Quitting Trying to Quit My Bad Habits – “As far as I remember, I was 25 at the time. The age I finally quit drinking and smoking. Several years later, I decided to quit social media as well. Along with that, I also stopped being so overly obsessed with owning fancy clothes. It turns out that a person can look and feel good if he spends a lot less on shirts and sneakers. We can all properly label the bad habits that tend to corrupt our lives. The tendency to smoke when you’re depressed. The stack of chips and ice cream for the moments of pure boredom.”

❯ Do Founders Even Care About Design? – “I’ve encountered founders who disregard design entirely. I’ve collaborated with them, as best as possible, but the situation was always identical, as well as the outcome. They believed they had enough knowledge and totally understood the target market they were serving. I envied their confidence, but frankly, I knew those founders were likely to either fail or forever chase growth.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

In last week's issue of Creativerly, I shared and published a new deep dive about a recent app I have added to my toolstack, and that app is called Flyleaf. Flyleaf is a lovey read-it-later app for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. It is not the usual read-it-later app, since thanks to a unique feature it raises your reading experience onto another level. Find out more here: Read articles like books – with Flyleaf.

❯ Quick Bits

• Spotify has now officially demonetised all songs with less than 1,000 streams
• DuckDuckGo Is Taking Its Privacy Fight to Data Brokers
• Google mocks Epic’s proposed reforms to end Android app market monopoly
• Google kills “One” VPN service, says “people simply weren’t using it”
• Elon Musk’s X to stop allowing users to hide their blue checks
• Revolut Valuation Raised 45% By Schroders Shows Fintech Rebound
• The AI Device Revolution Isn’t Going to Kill the Smartphone
• Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics
• The state of open source in Europe
• AI spam is winning the battle against search engine quality
• OpenAI CEO wants UAE into his plan for a global AI cabal
• Bluesky lifted its ban on heads of state signups

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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