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.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 372 👋

I am seeing a pattern recently. Since a couple of issues, I am having a hard time to write this intro section of the newsletter. And since a couple of weeks, I am finding no motivation to continue with all the books I have started, or work through my archive of saved articles. Reading and writing are not two separate activities, they are the same conversation, just entered from different doors. When you read, you are absorbing the way other minds have organized the world. When you write, you are doing the same thing yourself. The more you read, the more mental furniture you have to arrange.

Ideas rarely come from nowhere, they come from collision. Something you read three weeks ago crashes into something you observed yesterday, and suddenly you have a paragraph that feels entirely your own. Reading loads the cannon. Writing fires it.

And as I am not reading that much as of recently, I do not have that much to write about. So, what is my game plan right now? Well, simply sorting out some stuff so I hopefully find my motivation to read more again. And to be honest, just by writing those lines, I already feel some sort of energy and motivation coming back.

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Fresh Updates, news, and findings

Capacities introduces Image Analysis in early access →

Capacities' April update brought a new feature in beta for all Capacities Believers with AI enabled. Media analysis turns your screenshots, documents, and photos into information you can easily search, filter, and work with. Once you open any image in Capacities and click the "Analyze" button, the AI extracts a better title, a short description, detected text, a color palette, and a category. Text extraction is one of the most useful parts of this feature, as it work on screenshots, photos of whiteboards, and even handwritten notes. All extracted text is indexed by full-text search, so you can find images by the words that appear inside them.

Scratch is a minimalist markdown scratchpad for macOS →

I do not know what it is but writing and note-taking apps have a magical influence on myself. A couple of years ago, I switched back and forth between multiple writing apps before settling and committing to a single one, however, Scratch by Eric Li is tickling my senses again. Scratch is an offline-first markdown notes app, AI-friendly, keyboard-optimized, and design-centered. All the notes you create with Scratch are stored locally on your device as .md files. Thanks you WYSIWYG editing, you can edit your notes in rich text that saves as standard markdown. Additionally, you can connect your own Claude Code, Codex, or Ollama subscription in order to edit your notes with AI.

As Scratch is keyboard-optimized you can enjoy a keyboard-first navigation, as well as a nifty command palette to access various commands and actions quick and easy. Although, Scratch entitles itself as "scratchpad" it also features a focus mode which allows you to hide the UI with a shortcut for a completely distraction-free writing experience. In order to tailor Scratch to your needs, you can customize themes, typography, page width, RTL support, and more.

You can download and use Scratch completely for free, it is open source, and no account is needed in order to get started.

Mental Wealth

❯ When the crisis comes – “These days, we’re all living in a constant state of crisis, foisted upon us by a world where those who are meant to keep things stable are the least stable factors in our lives. The chaos and stress of that reality makes it difficult to make any plans, let alone to make decisions if you have responsibilities for a team or organization that you’re meant to be leading. It’s easy to imagine there’s nothing we can do, or to feel hopeless. But a resource that just arrived served as a timely reminder for me that a crisis doesn’t have to be paralyzing, and we don’t have to feel overwhelmed when trying to plan how we’ll respond as leaders.”

❯ Reflections on Writing for 20 Years – “Recently, this blog turned twenty. In that time, I’ve written over 1700 essays, seven books, two traditionally published and five self-published, and created hundreds of podcast episodes, videos, courses and more.”

❯ If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems – “It's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people who just discovered cryptocurrency in 2017. They've just come back from a conference. Or maybe a vendor dinner. Three glasses of pinot noir and a demo, and now they have news.”

❯ 30 days of writing – “Today is the last day of my writing PACT where I set out to write and publish a blog post every day for 30 days. I’ve written about various things that were on top of mind: Side projects, sport, personal finance, general life advice that I found useful, replies to blog posts and lately about our new family member.”

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These are paid promotions or affiliate links to support Creativerly. If you are interested in putting your tool, product, or resource in front of over 2000 creative minds, consider advertising in Creativerly and book a sponsor or classified ad spot. Find all the important information at creativerly.com/advertise.

Appendix

❯ ICYMI

You’ve saved 500 articles, 200 videos, and 100 podcasts, promising to revisit them ‘someday.’ But will you? Explore the ‘save for later’ paradox: why we hoard digital content, the illusion of productivity, and how to embrace (or break) the cycle in an age of AI-generated overload.

❯ Quick Bits

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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