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.
This issue of Creativerly is sponsored by Almus, your AI BFF for journaling.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 350 👋
As I already teased in the last issue of Creativerly, I am excited to share the new piece I have written for my personal blog: Introducing ShareBridgely – my first, and super niche macOS app.
Back in August 2024, I wrote abou…
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.
This issue of Creativerly is sponsored by Almus, your AI BFF for journaling.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 350 👋
As I already teased in the last issue of Creativerly, I am excited to share the new piece I have written for my personal blog: Introducing ShareBridgely – my first, and super niche macOS app.
Back in August 2024, I wrote about my reading setup. Throughout the months since then, I have not made any changes to that setup (which I am quite proud of, given the fact that I used to look into every single new app that popped up on my timelines a couple of years ago), until recently. Readwise, and Readwise Reader have been the core of my reading setup, as I used those apps to subscribe to RSS feeds, save links to articles to read them later, forward my newsletters, and capture highlights. Pretty cool thing to have all of that in a single app. However, Readwise Reader is also packed with a bunch of additional features, especially AI-powered ones. I have not used any of those features, simply because I have no need for them.
According to a recent newsletter I received from Readwise Reader, it seems like the team is going to double-down on those features, and also introduce them to Readwise (just a quick note, Readwise is one app, Readwise Reader is another one, so two products). So, I was evaluating whether it is still worth paying for my description when I just using core features. And since I decided it was time to cancel my subscription, I moved my digital reading habits to Reeder. As you probably know by now (if you have read last week’s issue), I ran into the issue that I could not access the macOS share sheet from Vivaldi (my browser) in order to save links to articles to Reeder to read them at a later time.
Which brings me to ShareBridgely, and the blog post I wrote about it on my personal blog. ShareBridgely is tiny, simple, and niche macOS apps, which basically just creates a bridge between a bookmarklet in your browser and the app, in order to trigger the native macOS share sheet to access all share extensions.
If you face a similar issue of being used to have a single button to access the share sheet on macOS in order to share links, but are using a Chromium-based browser, which means there is such button, head over to the blog post to get some more insights, and join the TestFlight to give it a try. In case there is a bigger demand for this app and it is not just me using it, I might submit it to the App Store, but before that, I will do some more testing, and refining, as well as writing about how much joy it brings to be using my own little app.
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Fresh Updates, news, and findings
Shopify launched a newsletter on Substack →
I have been writing about Substack and the fact that it is an evil platform multiple times. It has been in the news for all the wrong reasons over the past years, but still you find people launching their newsletters on Substack. However, it is not only individuals like independent journalists seeing Substack as the simplest and cheapest option (although it is not) to launch their newsletter, there are also companies using it. And the most recent one to start publishing on Substack is Shopify, which is kind of surprising, while it is not, as Shopify’s CEO, Tobias Lutke, has been regularly cozying up with the far right, as well as Trump supporters, and additionally, the whole c-level management has a close connection to far-right media.
Do whatever you want with that information, but now is the best time to ditch Substack, as there are so many alternatives available which all do a better job. When it comes to Shopify, I am glad I have never had to set up an online shop, since it would probably be super hard to find an alternative, as Shopify is dominating this space. Ultimately, it comes down to the personal perspective of separating the art from the artist, or this case the product from its CEO, but personally, I would have a hard time to rely with my business on a tool for which I am paying for, so its CEO and c-level friends can fuel far-right media with the revenue they make.
Cosmik Lab launches Semble Alpha, a way to collect links, organize them, and see what other are saving, built on the AT Protocol →
Recently, I have been diving into an AT Protocol rabbit hole, finding out about tools which are building on top of the protocol. While doing so, I found out about Cosmik, a company building tools and networks for collective sense-making, and its recent project Semble, which is now available in alpha for everyone to try out. Semble is a social network for researchers, which lets you follow your peers’ research trails, and surface and discover new connections. It lets you collect interesting links, add notes, and organize them into shareable collections. Once you connected with peers, you can see what they are sharing, and also find new collaborators with shared interests. As Semble is built on ATProto, you own your data, no more rebuilding your social graph and data when apps pivot and shut down.
Silk is a blogging platform for creative research, moodboarding, and subculture →
I just stumbled across Silk a couple of days ago, I have not used it, I have no insights into who is building it, when it will be available, and what it will actually do, but the website intrigued me. It states that users can use Silk for weaving a web of all the most interesting things they find online (which it calls “Blogs”), and save it all with a single click. You can think of Silk of a place for self expression via taste in media, write captions, pin favorites to your profile, follow other blogs, and connect with like-minds. Besides that, Silk can also act as private archives to collect your favorite media and inspiration from all across the web with your own personal internet archive. With “Webs” you get access to a new type of moodboard, as Silk allows any type of digital mediate to be dynamically arranged next to each other.
Additionally, each interaction on Silk should be productive, which means to create a chain reaction. This means that Silk is choosing to not support vanity metrics like follower counts and likes. Instead, when you stumble into a piece of media that you are interested in, all you have to do is to press the “Connect” button, which will give you the option to add the media back to your public blog, your private archive, any of your webs, or even chat room. And this brings us to another feature, chat rooms, which lets you introduce your interests to your people.
And all of that is connected through a magic search, as each piece of media uploaded to Silk is auto-tagged with its visual attributed and associations to reduce dependency on manual hashtags.
While this all sounds intriguing, the main reason I have not signed up to the waitlist is the fact that I have to leave my phone number, while the email is optional. Why? Why do you need my phone number? For verification? Well, there are other ways to do that too.
Mental Wealth
❯ The Fundamentals Problem – “A few months ago, a client was reviewing a landing page design with my team. They had created it themselves using a page builder tool — one of those platforms that integrate content management and visual design in a single interface. They wanted feedback as we prepared to take over their design systems.”
❯ What’s Still Worth Learning in a World With AI? – “I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of how AI shapes which skills are worth learning in the future. It used to be a pretty safe bet that learning to code was a good career move. Programming was in demand, and it was a career path that paid a good salary without requiring expensive credentials. Now, there’s a lot of panic that programmers may soon be out of a job, replaced by AI coding agents.”
❯ Why are we in this mess? – “AI didn’t devalue technological service work. At least not on its own. We are inclined to think AI is what has gotten us here because it’s the latest thing, and it’s how it’s being marketed and talked about on social media.”
❯ When a tool becomes a hobby – “Sometimes I get into collecting something, when usually a single one is enough, this happens with many tools, so I shared some thoughts about why.”
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Appendix
❯ ICYMI
AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas don’t improve the web, they replace it with corporate-controlled summaries and surveillance. People rush to adopt them, ignoring privacy risks and ethical flaws. The web thrives on openness, but AI browsers undermine that. Ask yourself: Who benefits? It’s not you. Read my post about why The web does not need AI browsers – It needs us to fight back.
❯ Quick Bits
- The Worst Thing About AI Is That People Can’t Shut Up About It (Katie Drummond / WIRED)
- When the AI bubble pops (Kelli Wessinger, Noel King / Vox)
- In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia (Robert Booth / The Guardian)
- Trump on why he pardoned Binance CEO: “Are you ready? I don’t know who he is.” (Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica)
- Italian company pays $1.5B for America’s most embarrassing email domain (Ellsworth Toohey / Boing Boing)
- Shell Quits Its Offshore Wind Project (Alexander C. Kaufman / Heatmap News)
- How to make people want to read about climate change (Jackie Flynn Morgensen / Mother Jones)
- Grokipedia is racist, transphobic, and loves Elon Musk (Robert Hart, Elissa Welle / The Verge)
- Reddit added to Australia’s teen social media ban due to start next month (Lana Lam / BBC)
- Meta Is Shutting Down Its Mac and Windows Messenger Apps. What You Need to Know (Aaron Pruner / CNET)
- YouTube announces ‘voluntary exit program’ for US staff (Aisha Malik / TechCrunch)
- Elon Musk’s $1tn Tesla pay deal to be rejected by huge Norway wealth fund (Lauren Almeida / The Guardian)
- AI’s trillion dollar deal wheel bubbling around Nvidia, OpenAI (Abishek Jadhav / The Register)
- Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google analytics tool (Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica)
- Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion compensation package (Anna Washenko / Engadget)
- Stop worrying about your AI footprint. Look at the big picture instead. (Casey Crownhart / MIT Technology Review)
- How TikTok cozied up to wealthy investors in Saudi Arabia and the UAE (Emily Baker-White / Rest of World)
- Perplexity to pay Snap $400M to power search in Snapchat (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)
- Rogan nods along as Musk explains that immigrants destroyed the US (Jason Weisberger / Boing Boing)
- Trump’s anti-climate agenda is making it more expensive to own a car (Umair Irfan / Grist)
- Meta can’t afford its $600B love letter to Trump (Tobias Mann / The Register)
- Washington Post confirms data breach linked to Oracle hacks (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch)
- The hidden, horrifying world behind all those recruitment scam texts (Jonquilyn Hill / Vox)
- Supreme Court blocks transgender people from updating passports (Kate Sosin / The 19th)
Thank you to the sponsor of this issue, Almus, your AI BFF for journaling.
**Till next time! 👋**
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