No More Boring Apps - ISSUE N.02
Our Daughter is still waking up during the nights. I spent some more time on Clubhouse. Discovered the Green Needle vs. Brainstorm Video. Andy & Mark launched "No more boring apps". What a week.
Welcome to ISSUE N.02 of What’s Inside My Head, if you missed last week’s issue read that first and thank you once again for having me.
Update on dad-da-da daddy life
We are starting to see the bottom two teeth trying to break through. This means that Sky Lou is not being herself at the moment and we have had a couple of fever waves. We’ll hang in there. She will be very proud to announce when her first little white gems have arrived.
This week me and her took to TikTok, to use our video making skills to create a dance video. Sky Lou is just about ready to start walking [early bird] so I figured that making a small dance video could be fun. I’ve got a total of 20 followers on TikTok so it felt like we were going to do just great 😂. To our surprise, we got +700 views and +100 likes on our first video. Song choice might not have been ideal for toddler dancing, but we’ll learn as we go. Watch video here.
We also had the opportunity to spend some quality time outside and went for a brunch together. Sky Lou just wanted to cuddle.
Enjoying every single second with this nugget. One thing I’m trying hard to do is to treat every day like it’s the only one you have. Life becomes so much more rich if you do. Kids or no kids.
What do you hear, Green Needle or Brainstorm?
This is definitely not new, but I’m drawn to these things. Jennie had it sent to her in one of her group chats. What fascinates me is how much our brains make stuff up. The fact that you hear what you read is just wild. Short version below and long version here. If you are interested in strange things our brain can do, I’d love to show you more interesting visual and audial experiences that f#€k*s with our internal signal processing. Just let me know in the comments below.
No more boring Apps
The Duo, Andy Allen & Mark Daws are behind the really interesting new app studio; Andy.works. Andy is the co-founder and designer behind, the almost decade old app Paper and the first real stylus for the iPad, the pencil.
What’s their angle? So for a very long time apps, and in this case, utility apps such as calculator, weather and timer have been left to become dull and boring. Yet these are some of our most used apps. Andy.works wants to radically challenge this notion. And make no more boring apps.
Let’s dig a bit deeper. Our mobile devices have gotten really powerful lately. Usually Apple and other manufacturers shows this off by showing more graphics intense games and 3D/AR apps. Andy.works is taking inspiration from games, but also from playful fidgeting, and brings 3D and haptics and beautifully crafted sound design into your everyday apps.
To me there is a lot to unpack, there is the nostalgia from early iPhone apps like Clear. That clearly [pun intended] did an amazing job staying timeless (the app is still in use and has not changed much since inception). It’s playful and does one thing very well, manages todo lists.
Then there is nuance, the visual attention to details like in games such as Altos Adventure or Monument Valley. Not to forget equally stunning sound design.
Lastly we have the invitation to fidget, tinker and explore. None of these apps really need to tell you how the want to be used. You explore by interacting. You feel in charge. There are so many small hidden easter eggs in each app!
You should read the their manifesto and listen to the Podcast Episode n.16 from MetaMuse starring Andy to get a deeper look behind the scenes.
Well done Andy & Mark
Can’t wait to see what you’ll will do to the alarm clock!
Clubhouse
Another week on Clubhouse and some new learnings. I guess same is true as last week, keep curating who and what clubs you follow. Get this right and Clubhouse will get a lot better for you.
On Friday I was in a room with some Swedish friends talking about the key to the perfect life. Not sure we solved any century old philosophical questions. I did however realise that this is the longest I’ve been on any social media platform for the past 5 years in one go.
Starting to think about what deeper impact Clubhouse will have. Will probably write a longer article about this on Medium. I think Ryan Hoover, founder of ProductHunt, put it well in a tweet this week.
This week’s tidbits
This week I’ve been less active on the inter-webs. However there are still some interesting things.
My Weekly Spotify playlist - brought to you by the Spotify AI
DispoHQ dropped a bunch of TestFlight invites, making people think TestFlight was a new social media. Dispo is a photo sharing app from YouTube Celeb David Dobrik.
Opal - Do you spend too much time in certain apps? This is like screen time but on steroids. Be more thoughtful on how you use your time. Make sure you check out their twitter too.
The GameStop house committee hearing took place, and Roaring kitty left us all a message.
Canadian Artist Mad Dog Jones sold NFT’s for 4 Million in 9 min. The race for tokenised artwork is truly on.
Tesla on Monday bought $1.5bn dollars worth of Bitcoin. Making the Crypto currency rise to new record highs. It’s currently trading at $57.400.
Mars Perseverance Rover successfully landed on Mars. The branding of the Mars mission was done by Tobias Van Schneider and his team.
Any feedback or ideas on how I can make this better is most welcome. Thank you for reading.
Written by Linus Ekenstam, trouble maker at sensive.xyz – You can find me on Twitter & Instagram
PS. The email was delayed due to an unexpected technical issue with Substack. Thank you Kendra from Substack Support who solved it on a weekend.