Yac is a bit like those short messages you can record in iMessage or Instagram, but for your desktop: “Yac is personal, asynchronous communication built for remote teams.” It also comes with a range of collaborative features, such as short, annotated screencasts.

Hopin is Zoom for event organisers. It adds a range of useful tools to the typical live cast apps. For example, you can allow event attendees to meet each other in a side chat, create multiple, simultaneous event sessions, and more.

“Code Time is an open source plugin for automatic programming metrics and time-tracking, right in your editor.” Once activated, you get stats like: how many lines you added per day, how much time you spent in your editor, total keystrokes, and more.

With this iOS app you can assemble your photos in unique ways and create a carousel that splits photos over multiples frames, optimised for Instagram.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism →

Controlling our behaviour for profit

The term ‘surveillance capitalism’ pops up in more and more interviews in Offscreen. This is the book and author that popularised the term and brought the underlying issues into the spotlight: “The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behaviour modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.”

Wingback Pen →

Machined ballpoint pen

Another great-looking ‘buy-once’ pen, manufactured in the UK from aerospace-grade brass. “A satisfying single-handed twist locks the nib mechanism in place. Every pen can be personalised with a laser engraved inscription of up to 50 characters along the length of the barrel.”

This has been quite useful in dealing with all the feels: “It’s a good time to stock up on compassion. Everyone will have different levels of fear and grief and it manifests in different ways. A coworker got very snippy with me the other day and I thought, That’s not like this person; that’s how they’re dealing with this. I’m seeing their fear and anxiety.”

I really like the sound of this new design approach that puts the collective first. If not now, when? “All around us we see signs that patriarchal capitalism and exploitative business models place profit over privacy, and efficiency over agency. They pit individuals against the collective. At their core, they are hierarchical and exclusionary.”

Big Tech could do more and more aggressively to help fight Covid-19. Some suggestions by Tristan Harris. “It’s time for technology companies to demonstrate how much good they can do when they act like public utilities operating for the greater common good, rather than optimizing for extraction and profit. These steps would mark a transformational moment, shifting the old arrangement of large technology platforms toward a ‘duty of care’ that prioritizes the public interest.”