With Tandem you can hang out and collaborate with colleagues in a minimal voice/video call in almost any app. You can even share your cursor with them to work on visual projects together.

Using a lot of sticky notes during team meetings? With Brill you can “convert your handwritten notes into text using speech or photos. Manage them in folders or with tags and export your notes, ideas or meeting outputs to Trello.”

Whether you’re offering protected member-only content or just want to build a simple user dashboard, MemberStack provides a designer-friendly membership management platform.

Product designer and strategist Ryan Singer just published an extensive guide on how they do product development at Basecamp. “It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.”

Mogu-Kagu →

Curved wooden coaster

Filing this under ‘first world gifts’: the Mogu-Kagu coaster is a hand-made wooden coaster from Fukuoka, Japan. “The slightly curved corner provides a graceful and whimsical characteristic, as well as making the coaster easier to grab and pick up.” Well done on a subtle, but oh so effective design tweak.

Because Internet →

Understanding the new rules of language

What a great title for an intriguing new book: “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies.”

Eli Pariser writes that being online is a constant dignity violation, in large part due to treating people instrumentally, as means to the end of growing active usership and revenue per user: “Social technologies don’t just treat us instrumentally – they encourage us to look at one another that way as well, as a means to higher status or a better job or a measurement of self-worth.”

A fascinating read about what goes on in our heads while being exposed to today’s divisive nature of... everything. Essentially, we’re dealing with a perpetual, unresolved perception of a threat: “We need to understand that our inner and outer crises are two sides of the same coin.”

Speaking of threat perception: “You’d have to either be a psychopath or superhuman to not feel overwhelmed by the volume and scale of the climate stories we’re being exposed to – so here’s a guide to staying sane for the rest of us.”