I always thought I knew all the major apps competing with Adobe’s Creative Suite, then I came across Affinity over the weekend. It’s a suite of three applications: Photo, Designer, and Publisher, covering a broad spectrum of use-cases for creatives. All apps are available for Mac and Windows and currently come with a 90-day free trial.

In the past, I used Doodle to agree on a date/time for meetings with different parties, but it’s becoming harder to navigate and cloaked in ads. Lettucemeet is clean and distraction-free.

I’m currently trialling different apps to help transcribe our interviews for Offscreen. Descript has a great interface that allows editing audio by editing text. A neat feature for podcasts, but not necessary for Offscreen. Our recordings are often of lower quality, so the transcription result by Descript wasn’t that great so far.

A Chrome extension that lets you watch Netflix together with friends: “Netflix Party synchronises video playback and adds group chat to your favourite Netflix shows.”

Utopia for Realists →

And how we can get there

I read this book a while back and found it to be an easy-to-read summary of promising, optimistic policies whose time has come: “In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman shows that we can construct a society with visionary ideas that are, in fact, wholly implementable. Every milestone of civilisation – from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy – was once considered a utopian fantasy. New utopian ideas such as universal basic income and a fifteen-hour work week can become reality in our lifetime.”

reMarkable 2 →

‘Paper’ tablet

reMarkable just announced a new version of its ‘digital paper’ tablet. It’s certainly a niche gadget, targeted mostly at writers and sketch artists, with a low-latency E ink-like screen that replicates paper in digital form. It lacks all the usual internet-enabled distractions, which is actually a selling point. I personally have no real use for this thing, but I love the sound/look of this screen!

It’s probably too early to talk about silver linings of this chaos, but the internet sure feels different these days: “(...) the virus is forcing us to use the internet as it was always meant to be used – to connect with one another, share information and resources, and come up with collective solutions to urgent problems. It’s the healthy, humane version of digital culture we usually see only in schmaltzy TV commercials, where everyone is constantly using a smartphone to visit far-flung grandparents and read bedtime stories to kids.”

Gretchen McCulloch, author of the book Because Internet, created an excellent blog series about ‘Weird Internet Careers’ which I can very much relate to: “Weird Internet Careers are the kinds of jobs that are impossible to explain to your parents, people who somehow make a living from the internet, generally involving a changing mix of revenue streams.”

Published in November last year, this article feels more relevant today than ever before: “We can treasure the intrinsic rewards of sharing instead of hoarding and possessing. We can replace distractions with relationships and build more sustainable social norms based on humane and inclusive values. We can set our intention to connect with others: to talk, to listen and understand each other. Only then can we act collectively to change the status quo.”