macOS app Plash lets you set any website as your desktop wallpaper – either as a refreshing image or as a real, interactive web page. Or use Plash to regularly pull content from a feed or image source and display it as your desktop background.

Collected Notes is an extremely simple iOS and web app to create private or public notes/posts in Markdown. Here’s a sample post.

Most of the video chat or collaboration platforms follow similar UI patterns. MakeSpace is the first such tool that really got me excited to collaborate online! Still in an early testing stage, MakeSpace allows you to completely customise a shared space – with video, shared browsing and streaming, and various other tools. A great team behind it, too! I hope they go through with the idea of turning this into a non-profit!

If you’re serious about your bookmark collection, Bookmark OS gives you some powerful tools to organise, sort, display, and export bookmarks.

Engaged →

Designing for behaviour change

A lot of the discussion about how psychology and design interconnect is focused on social media addiction (for good reasons), but better understanding behavioural science can also help us design for positive impact. “Whether you’ve studied psychology or are new to the field, you can incorporate behaviour change principles into your designs to help people achieve meaningful goals, learn and grow, and connect with one another. Engaged offers practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.”

Sandqvist Harald →

Functional backpack

I really like the colour combos of this line of Sandqvist backpacks. Made from water-resistant polyester with some nice leather patch details, the inside holds 21 litres and includes a 13-inch laptop pocket. If Harald isn’t your cup of tee, try Bernt or the smaller Ilon.

At a time when days blend into each other with no discernible difference, here’s some sound life advice: “That these are sad times and it feels bad to live in them is hardly insightful, but lately I’ve been wondering if it’s not so much the sadness but the sameness. Watching wicked people prosper over and over, having the same conversations about powerful men and the consequences they will never face, witnessing suffering that was easily anticipated and avoided, asking again and again what can be done about it and being told again and again, essentially, ‘nothing’.”

This talk by engineering manager Anjuan Simmons provides a great overview of how some of us can use our privilege within a company to lift up others. Importantly, he argues that it starts with a grassroots effort – rather than a D&I policy coming from the top – because HR departments will always prioritise the good of the company, not that of the individual.

A deeper look at what drives different types of internet trolls. I don’t necessarily agree with Adam’s approach to responding to trolls, even though he makes clear that a lack of compassion/empathy is part of what creates trolling behaviour in the first place. “It is easier to view trolls as bad apples than see them as something inside all of us, waiting for the right environment to let loose. But when we condemn trolls as inherently malicious individuals, we limit our understanding of what may drive these behaviors.”