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 294 👋

Well, just like that we entered the last quarter of 2024. It always astonishes me how fast time flies by, or at least the feeling of that. However, I kind of like the feeling of wrapping up a year, especially when it has been a challenging one like this one. Now comes the time of the year, where I slow down a bit, recharge, reflect, and start thinking about some upcoming plans and goals. So, as it feels this time came faster than ever, I am still looking forward to it.

Now, enjoy this week's newsletter.

Half-life Productivity Software

Back in February 2024, the ex co-founder and CEO of Muse, Adam Wiggins, wrote a fantastic retrospective post after announcing in August 2023, that after loads of work and effort, Muse did not become a sustainable business, which lead to most of the team departing, while Adam Wulf continued to develop Muse as a solo entrepreneur. The post is full of insights. What stood out to me was specifically this part:

I’d speculate that another factor is the half-life of cool new productivity software. Evernote, Slack, Notion, Roam, Craft, and many others seem to get pretty far on community excitement for their first few years. After that, I think you have to be left with software that serves a deep and hard-to-replace purpose in people’s lives. Muse got there for a few thousand people, but the economics of prosumer software means that just isn’t enough. You need tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, to make the cost of development sustainable.

Loads of people switch apps, especially productivity and note-taking software, constantly, as they are on the hunt for the perfect tool. The world of productivity software is ever-evolving, and people are always on the hunt for the next game-changing app. Despite the abundance of choices, many of us find ourselves in a cycle of adoption and abandonment. Adam Wiggins called this phenomenon in his retrospective post half-life of cool new productivity software. The term half-life productivity software reflects people's tendency to switch tools frequently, without allowing any single solution to become truly indispensable in our lives.

In physics half-life describes the time it takes for half of a radioactive substance to decay. When we are talking about productivity software, it represents the relatively short period between someone enthusiastically adopting a new tool and when the same individual begins to look for its replacement.

People have a weird relationship with technology. Many are striving for the quest for the perfect solution, experiencing the urge to be as productive as possible. And this is the perfect example, how toxic the whole productivity sector is, amplified by productivity gurus who keep on praising new and shiny software.

Read the whole post here:

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Fresh Updates & News

Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible →

In 2023, thousands of subreddits on Reddit went private in the course of a protest against Reddit's API pricing changes (which were absurd), which forced beloved third-party clients like Apollo to shut down. Steve Huffman showed his real attitude during those times, as he decided to force moderators of protesting communities to make them public again, or Reddit will remove them from their posts and take their moderator roles.

Now, a year later, Reddit is back with some madness, as it is giving its staff a lot more power over the communities on its platform. Moderators will no longer be able to change if their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit admin. Those are communities created by people, and they are only existing because of those people. Reddit would not be the place it is today without those communities created by those people. Yet, they decide to further take their rights away.

Croissant lets you cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads with ease →

Social media is fragmented. It feels like you need to install several social media apps to keep up with what the people you want to follow are posting. Some people stayed on X (I have no idea why), others joined Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and others. In case you want to be active on all those platforms, to be active where you audience is, and let them decide where to follow you, it is tedious work to open up one app after the other when creating a post.

Services like Buffer made it easy to cross-post to multiple networks, however they can become quite expensive, especially for designers, artists, indie developers, and other who might can not afford or do not need most of their features. However, thanks to Croissant, a beautiful and lovely app created by Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh, cross-posting to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads got simplified and is available to everyone at a feasible price. Croissant is simple and minimal, free for a single account, and multiple ones cost you €2.99 per month, €22.99 per year, or €69.99 for the Lifetime option.

To get a glimpse into Croissant's features read through the linked review by John Vorhees for MacStories.

The new Muse iPhone app →

Muse just launched its new iPhone app, which has been completely rebuilt. With this update, Muse introduces 11 new quick capture tools. This means, you are now able to get one-tap access to text, photo roll, audio recording, camera, file upload, and much more. Besides that, the sync system has rebuilt from the original iCloud sync to now using the same sync engine that powers Muse on iPad and Mac. So, you can now enjoy a faster and more consistent sync.

The new iPhone app is also ready for iOS 18 offering support for Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools. In the announcement blog post, Muse stated that these new features align perfectly with Muse's philosophy of thoughtful creation. I am not sure how much of Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools are needed for more thoughtful creation, but as I will not use and probably experience those anyway, let us focus on the real important things of this update, which is a lovely new iOS app for Muse.

Juno for YouTube by Christina Selig, removed from App Store →

A few months ago, YouTube contacted Christian Selig (developer of the beloved Apollo Reddit client), since they stated that Juno, Selig's new app, a YouTube client for VisionOS, does not adhere to YouTube's guidelines. Christian Selig states as much to YouTube that Juno is just a web view, no logos are placed other than those already on the website, and it does not block ads in any capacity. Nevertheless, Apple removed Juno from the App Store, as YouTube contacted the App Store.

In his blog post, Christian Selig states that Juno was a fun hobby project to built for him, however, he has also zero desire to spin into a massive fight with YouTube, especially because of what happened with Reddit years ago.

Halide app adds new functions for the iPhone 16 Camera Control button→

Halide is a lovely and powerful camera app for iOS. The newest update brought new features for the iPhone 16's camera control button. Users are now able to adjust focus and exposure on Camera Control.

What AI means for Sketch, how they might use it, how they will never use it →

The founders of Sketch, Emanuel Sá and Pieter Omvlee, recently shared Sketch's stance on AI, how they might use it, how they will never use it, and what guides their thinking. While the post says that AI might be in our future, Sá and Omvlee wrote that it will not be generating designs, as the opportunities they see for AI to aid designers, is during their daily workflows, i.e. renaming layers, organizing files, isolating images, or finding specific symbols deep in a large library.

Besides that, if Sketch ever sees a use case that would require training an AI model on designs, they would only ever do it on the user's device, privately, for the user's benefit only. Furthermore, Sketch stated that they will not use any third-party models until they can prove they have permission from their data sources and disclose them transparently.

A strong message from one of the most popular design tools out there.

Mental Wealth

❯ The value of good design – “In 2023 the value of design should be clearer than ever, it’s been proven that businesses that recognise the importance of a design-centric approach are in a better position to succeed.”

❯ A New Way to View Money and Happiness – “For decades now, scientists have been trying to figure out what role wealth plays in our satisfaction with life. While some studies have found that money doesn’t buy happiness (at least not beyond a certain income point), others have found money plays a much more significant role. Wealthier countries seem happier overall, and citizens in those countries enjoy more well-being as their income climbs.”

❯ What could you change in a year – “On Monday, I’m opening my new course, Foundations, for enrollment. It is a year-long program designed to help you build better habits and practices around twelve universal pillars of the good life. It’s always difficult to tell exactly how much someone can benefit from a course like this one. That’s not because the benefits can’t be enormous—they can be. It’s simply because every person is different, and different starting points necessarily imply different ending points. So, instead of talking about how the course might benefit you, I’ll talk about how the experience that inspired this course—my first effort at improving my foundations—benefitted me.”

❯ The Quest to Imagine a Workplace that (Actually) Values Work-Life Balance – “Changing entrenched work culture is hard. I had a front-row seat to a project that tried. In 2018, the behavioral design firm ideas42 kicked off a project to better understand what drives people to overwork and to test interventions that would improve individual work-life conflict and well-being.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

Finding the right browser is a tedious, hard, and overwhelming task. Browser feel weird right now. Instead of focusing on innovating the way we are interacting with the world wide web, the innovation we got so far are vertical tabs in a sidebar, and data-scraping AI features. I wrote a deep dive in which you can find out why you can rule out a lot of browsers, and what are the ones that excite me right now.

❯ Quick Bits

• Pirate library must pay publishers $30M, but no one knows who runs it (Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica)
• OpenAI planning to become for-profit company, say reports (Dan Milmo / The Guardian)
• Hidden traces of humanity: what AI images reveal about our world (Rachel Ossip / The Guardian)
• 91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship (Iain Thomson / The Register)
• Microsoft’s more secure Windows Recall feature can also be uninstalled by users (Tom Warren / The Verge)
• Apple backs out of backing OpenAI, report claims (Samuel Axon / Ars Technica)
• Far-right extremists flee from Telegram to SimpleX over privacy features (Ben Makuch / The Guardian)
• 6-fingered gloves sent to Altman, EU leaders in chilling AI warning (Thomas Macaulay / The Next Web)
• Germany is monitoring Microsoft to thwart 'anti-competitive practices' (Paul Kunert / The Register)
• Meta Can’t Use Sexual Orientation to Target Ads in the EU, Court Rules (Morgan Meaker / Wired)
• X fails to avoid Australia child safety fine by arguing Twitter doesn’t exist (Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica)
• Google’s theft protection features have started showing up for some Android users (Cheyenne MacDonald / Engadget)
• AI startup Poolside raises $500M as AI coding market booms (Thomas Macaulay / The Next Web)
• Latest in WordPress war: Automattic says it wanted 8% cut of WP Engine revenue (Thomas Claburn / The Register)
• Another OpenAI founder moves to arch-rival Anthropic (Brandon Vigliarolo / The Register)
• OpenAI closes the largest VC round of all time (Cody Corrall / TechCrunch)

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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