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Ask HN: What is a creative product you've discovered recently?
It does not have to be a tech product. Just something that is radically new, not a variation of some other well know product.
- Pandabob 6y agoI feel embarrassed saying this but I feel both Clubhouse and TikTok are pretty amazing. Both of them lower the barrier of entry on content creation and make distribution easier when one is starting out.
- deanebarker 6y agoTikTok is enabling some awesome creativity, which is weird because I can't figure out why it's anything new. Like, why did this one app take off all of a sudden?
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoIt didn't; TikTok released six years ago in China. In the West, the app musica.ly was more popular, but it was merged with TikTok. Before TikTok and Musica.ly there was Vine, founded in 2012 which had a peak of 200 million active users by 2015. And of course there's Instagram, which has allowed short videos since 2013 as well to try and compete with Vine. And of course before all of those there was Youtube.
- rlyshw 6y agothe transparent content suggestion algorithm is insanely good. If you spend any amount of time in the actual app, you'll find it immediately starts catering content to you based on your specific interests (without ever obviously indicating them). Pair that with a very simple yet powerful "editing" suite, complete with audio editing and vfx, the app is the perfect storm for micro video content creation/consumption.
- amelius 6y agoGrowth hacking, probably.
- stevewodil 6y agoI'm not sure I would call spending billions in ads growth hacking
- amelius 6y agoThat's brute-forcing ;)
- daniellarusso 6y agoI don’t think anybody else in the social space has managed to work out licensing music as part of the content creation. Imagine if Spotify bought Snap.
- tmaly 6y agoCan you give some examples of awesome creativity on TikTok? I do not have the app, but I have only seen people share funny videos.
- cableshaft 6y agoThe only non-humor creativity I've ever really seen is BoardGamesInAMinute[1], doing minute overviews of board games. But I don't go to TikTok much myself. https://www.tiktok.com/@puffindor https://www.tiktok.com/@puffindor
- typon 6y agoI haven't found a single conversation on Clubhouse that was 1. interesting 2. i could take a part in I guess they are still growing, but I feel like the format has severe flaws and I don't know if they can be easily resolved as they scale. The idea is still solid though, but I don't know if they can execute it really well. Currently its a bunch of wantrepeneurs trying to sell themselves and that's really boring.
- ajsharp 6y agoWhen clubhouse is good, it's magic. But they have a content quality / signal noise ratio problem currently, making it hard to find good content. Combined with how notifications work, it makes the app very noisy and hard to find the good stuff.
- victorevector 6y agoThis is how I felt before I found a room I regularly frequent. We meet up once a week for the past 3 weeks, and so far it's 3 consistent participants with 2-3 newcomers each time. I've only met 1 of them in real life. We talk about surfing ;p. What I've learned is that Clubhouse is only fun if you're participating. Unstructured conversations are hard to follow if you're not actively shaping it.
- christkv 6y agoThe other clubhouse http://clubhouse.io http://clubhouse.io to keep my projects going. Just the simplicity of getting started with an agile board was great.
- cesarvarela 6y agoBeware of the dopamine addiction, specially TikTok, I think it's so addictive it should be regulated :)
- jschveibinz 6y agoNotion.so I have been an Evernote user for years. But Notion allows me to easily create connections between notes and to creatively synthesize new ideas in ways that Evernote never could. I am very happy with Notion.
- Cenk 6y agoIf that‘s the reason you like Notion over Evernote, Supernotes (https://supernotes.app https://supernotes.app) might work well for you too.
- jschveibinz 6y agoThank you. I will check it out.
- utucuro 6y agoThis looks like an online-only version of Joplin, interesting. Personally I ended up with Joplin to achieve and exceed feature parity with Evernote for my own use case...
- wsostt 6y agoI tried Notion but got turned off by their security policies. I use a lot of encrypted notes in Evernote and haven’t found a SAAS replacement with that feature plus the other Evernote features I use.
- ortusdux 6y agoLookingGlass displays. Their small version is available for pre-order for $250 and ships in June. I've got a leap motion laying around and some experience with Unity, so it sounds like something that would be fun to mess around with.
- zamadatix 6y agoIs there anywhere that list the technical specifications of the display? Seems like an creative concept they're selling I'm just not sure what I'd actually be buying.
- ortusdux 6y agoIt looks like their kickstarter has all the info: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lookingglass/looking-glass-portrait https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lookingglass/looking-gl... Linus did a decent review of the tech back in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw
- zamadatix 6y agoctrl+f resolution -> nothing ctrl+f pixel -> the android phone "Pixel" ctrl+f hz/refrash/ rate -> nothing What's the effective resolution of a view? What's the refresh rate? What's the color depth? What's the max viewing angle? What's the max perceived depth? How bright is it? Somewhere in the 11 minute Linus video it might touch on these for the version of the product their reviewing but certainly not in one place and not for the final specs of the version listed above. E.g. if this were a cell phone I don't want to hear about how they reached a stretch goal for a video camera which enables you to capture life's experiences in motion... I want to know the specifications of the video camera, and all of the other components.
- ortusdux 6y agoLytro made a depth field camera and people made the exact same complaints. Lytro cameras and a 35mm are apples and oranges. Same goes for a phone screen and this display. It is 45 sandwiched light field displays. It projects 8.3 million rays of light over a 50 degree arc. 16m RGB color @ 60hz. It's viewing area is measured in liters.
- tanylak 6y agoA pen and paper. It might be so old and unused that it has become radically new and extremely creative. :)
- sidpatil 6y agoOne of my favorite pre-pandemic pastimes was to browse stationery shops and office supply stores. There's something exciting about seeing all those materials and supplies waiting to be used.
- allforJesse 6y agoSeconded! Something about perusing the blank pages in all their shapes and sizes feels like strolling through a world of raw potential.
- feiss 6y agoYay! I love it too...
- merwanedr 6y agoWorkFlowy is pretty good for brainstorming an idea without worrying too much about structuration. I've discovered it recently and can only recommend it.
- allforJesse 6y agoFor anyone who lives by bullet-point lists and goes way too many layers indented, Workflowy is the solution. You can click in and out of any layer of your lists and go as deep as fits your needs. 10/10, one of my favorite tools for brainstorming, organization, amorphous note storage.
- Justen 6y agoI've used this for a while to track ideas and tasks, but just recently started using it to track recipes as well. (My sous vide cheesecake recipe for example: https://workflowy.com/s/sous-vide-cheesecake/edLz9ugNA3IPrF87 https://workflowy.com/s/sous-vide-cheesecake/edLz9ugNA3IPrF8...)
- xeRTRex 6y agoI just checked out their website, it's really annoying. Zero information on pricing, you need to create an account to "try for free" to access that information.
- gijsnijholt1980 6y agoBlender3D for video editing is really cool. iMovie crashed bad on me and I never got it working again. Almost paid 300 bucks for Final Cut Pro. Then remembered that Blender had this built in. And its really good. No need to import videos into a bin or nonsense like that. Just drag them into the timeline, add filters, drag to reorder, render to mp4/aac and its done. Best discovery of the year sofar
- krmmalik 6y agoHave you heard about DaVinci Resolve?
- kyriakos 6y agoThat's my recent great find. It's amazing that it's given fir free even for personal use.
- muhammadusman 6y agoI thought Blender was for animation, didn't occur to me you can just edit video within it.
- CharlesW 6y ago> Almost paid 300 bucks for Final Cut Pro. Tip: If you're in school or have a family member in school, Apple's "Pro Apps Bundle for Education" is a great deal. https://www.apple.com/us-hed/shop/product/BMGE2Z/A/pro-apps-bundle-for-education https://www.apple.com/us-hed/shop/product/BMGE2Z/A/pro-apps-...
- noahatwi 6y agoLossless-cut is a great little tool for splitting and merging videos too (limited by i-frames), but lightning fast.
- codegeek 6y agoI found remarkable [0] recently and ordered one. I love writing with pen and paper. Remarkable looks the closest to that experience and can save digitally. It's like having your cake and eat it too :) [0] https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/
- mcraealex16 6y agoI have found my rocketbook[0] extremely useful for the task. Its almost as good as real paper and you can find the pens anywhere. Only issue is once you scan it you can't edit it. [0] https://getrocketbook.com/ https://getrocketbook.com/
- feiss 6y agoWat?? Could you explain me how it works? Is it a screen? Regular paper? Something in the middle? Really curious...
- xtracto 6y agoIt´s a normal notebook but with some kind of plastic-coated paper sheets. You can use certain type of pens to draw on it which is deleted with heat. I bought one for my wife that can be heated in the microwave to "reset" it. A pretty nice gimmick for someone that still write in paper.
- patagurbon 6y agoIt's a kind of plasticky paper. It's got QR codes on it and little circles at the bottom so you can save each scan to different places. The paper is a little slick to pass for real pen and paper writing experience, but it's not bad.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThe pen used is a Frixion pen. If cleaned in a week or so, the ink can wipe off with a damp cloth (similar to wet erase markers). But it can also be cleared with heat/friction (be aware, sufficiently cooling it can cause it to reappear, at least faintly). This also means you shouldn't leave something written with these pens in the car on a hot summer day unless the intent is to clear the page to write over. Along with Rocketbook notebooks, you can also look into "stone paper" products which offer similar usability but without the scanning tool/app that Rocketbook provides.
- JackMorgan 6y agoRoam Research has made tracking all the details to GM my DnD campaigns a breeze. I find the "daily notes" really lowers the barrier to entry for just writing. I find myself writing a lot more with it.
- sambroner 6y agoLiterally exactly my first use case of Roam. Unbelievably good for world building.
- zrkrlc 6y agoWhat does your workflow look like? I have a page for each entity in my stories and use tags in metadata to group them, but for actual plotting it doesn't work quite as well.
- dangoor 6y agoI've been using Obsidian for world building recently, but Roam would be great for this (if not better) as well.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoTelegram + dynamist Every time I have an idea, I send a message to myself using telegram: there is actually a widget just for that in android. It's awesome cause you can type, take a a picture or a video, dictate... And it syncs across devices, giving you access anywhere to a timeline of your thoughts. Then when I got time I pop the stack and sort in as projects into the wonderful dynamist. It works offline, on Linux and mobile, syncs, allows notes and nested todo.
- bhaskara2 6y agoWhat is dynamist?
- kjksf 6y agoI'm guessing it's a typo and he meant https://dynalist.io/ https://dynalist.io/
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoYes.
- joj123 6y agoI do the same with Whatsapp using a neat trick someone told me about. Create a group(call it "Share with self" or similar) with you and another person. Then, remove that person from the group.. that's it! Functionally it's the same as sending yourself Slack messages, but on WA, which is good
- rsync 6y agoI hesitate because the product isn't that new and I have praised it quite a bit already at HN ... ... but nextdns is Such. A. Great. Idea. I really wish I had thought of it - not only is it a great idea but it would have been so fun to spin up a global dns network (I wouldn't have done it with cloud instances - I would have owned the servers ...). Also, I hear some rumblings about some less-than-perfect behavior from nextdns - specifically how their own homepage has trackers on it ... although, as of this writing, ublock origin had zero hits, so perhaps they have cleaned that up ...
- dominotw 6y agoI don't if its creative but boox air has been life changing for me. I've doubled my reading easily because my eyes aren't hurting. I am actually reading full length articles now. So boox air + pocket app = increased reading.
- ralusek 6y agoGeForce Now. I've known about these "cloud gaming" utilities for some time, but have always just owned my own hardware. I typically don't bother asking my friends to play games with me, because the only ones with a gaming PC are already the few I play games with. The rest I figure would never spend the time or the money to get one. Recently, I wanted my girlfriend to play a game with me, but it didn't run on Mac. I was about to set up dual boot for her, but then remembered that this existed, so I figured I'd give it a try. Extremely easy to get up and running, and you can even run it from a browser. Given that your internet connection is good enough, latency is low and quality is high. I'm now recommending it to all of my friends.
- dangoor 6y agoI considered GeForce Now, but went with Shadow.tech instead. Shadow gives you a gaming PC in the cloud, where you can bring your own Steam, Epic, etc. You can even use SteamVR with it. So far, my experience has been very good.
- multjoy 6y agoThey current have a waitlist of nearly 6 months, which is quite some way from ideal.
- dangoor 6y agoAre you sure about that? I signed up in early Feb with a Feb 25th date, and ended up getting my account just a few days later. Edit: Oh, I see from their site that it's dependent on your location. In my location, it was quite quick.
- legitster 6y agoSnagIt! 80% of what I do is sending people screenshots. It's ridiculously time saving for me, and is one of the first things I install on a new computer.
- airhead969 6y agoI'll leave software aside: - Toto 550 bidet and a poop stool changed my life. - Sideclick learning remote that snaps on to a Fire TV remote. - "Neon" addressable LED RGB silicone strips that don't have the fugly individual LEDs exposed. Especially neat when directed by a music & bluetooth controller. - It's something I assembled: installed a waterfall shower head and wand in an apartment using a very long extension pipe, 6 heavy-duty removable bathroom hooks, and strong fishing line for support like a bridge. - Toilet bowl motion lights for not just toilet bowls. - Hand-made plamp hats. - Vinyl records turned into bowls. - Sunglasses made from discarded baseball bats. - Bed made out of enameled rebar with chemical drum nightstands. - Lighting and tornado detector. - Handmade and custom items on Etsy all the time.
- stevewodil 6y ago>Handmade and custom items on Etsy all the time. Someday I will be buying one of these: https://www.etsy.com/shop/bensworx https://www.etsy.com/shop/bensworx
- airhead969 6y agoWooooah! Neat. Inevitably, such beautiful designs will be applied to "health & wellness personal products." Also, why are Etsy sellers offering downloads of unartistic nudes for $5 and others selling tons of Chinese generic products claiming they're "handmade"? Has Etsy stopped curating?
- tmaly 6y agoThis is something I never considers. I know Etsy had handmade items, I just never thought about the custom aspect.
- chaostheory 6y ago> Vinyl records turned into bowls. hopefully, you're not using this with food
- airhead969 6y ago
- enko123 6y agoBone conducting headphones are nice, especially if you realize you are too tired to read after work, but not too tired to listen. You can still interact with people around you because there's a quick play/pause button.
- ijustwanttovote 6y agoThere are also great while riding a bike.
- hojjat12000 6y agoI think this key cluster module [0] for the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard is pretty creative. I don't own a UHK or this module, but I think this is a better answer to your question than Workflowy, Notion, Roam Research, and pen and paper. [0] https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/product/keycluster https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/product/keycluster
- thefunnyman 6y agoI just ordered a Moonlander, but the UHK was one of the boards I considered. Those interchangeable thumb modules are such a brilliant idea. If the UHK were ortho it would have been a much harder choice for me.
- rhencke 6y agoFUSER. It's basically easy-mode music mixing/DJing with live cooperative multiplayer.
- piazz 6y agoCraft (https://craft.do https://craft.do) has become my goto note taking / productivity / knowledge management app. I've tried Workflowy, Roam, Obsidian, and Notion before landing here. It has a great compromise of features I liked from all the different apps, native mac + iOS applications (huge if you're coming from Notion electron land), and a great dev team that's delivering new features at a rapid clip. Edit: Matter (https://getmatter.app https://getmatter.app) has replaced Pocket / Instapaper / Email as my article reader & queue. Still early but looks quite promising.
- ortusdux 6y agoWalden Pond. It's a service that curates unread articles from your Pocket collection, print, binds, and mails them to you. I get the long edition, which works out to about 140 pages for $14 USD/month. I've used pocket for years, but I collect articles much faster than I read them. I currently have enough saved for 300 editions. You can tag articles as must-print. The print quality and paper are amazing. It's now my preferred way to read good online content, especially things I know I will want to read again in the future. Here is the table of contents for my most recent volume: https://imgur.com/a/3ceBfOB https://imgur.com/a/3ceBfOB https://waldenpond.press/ https://waldenpond.press/
- notionparallax 6y agoI just came across this by accident! I make WP* for exactly this reason. I'm about to finish a 12 hour edition that I made to test if the printers could handle it (they could) and there's no way I'd have read that much on my phone. * WP is my iso project
- meowster 6y agoNot recently but as a kid: wooden blocks, LEGO, a pad of graph paper, a pad of blank paper, ruler, mechanical pencil. Ocassionally as an adult, the pads of paper and mechanical pencil are great for doodling. For kids, those items alone aren't the magic answer - it's raising them so that they'll be okay with just those items. I hope to have kids in the next couple of years, and they won't be given electronic pacifiers.
- jacknews 6y agoThe dodow 'sleep aid' https://www.mydodow.com/dodow/en-us/home https://www.mydodow.com/dodow/en-us/home Incredibly creative how they turn a flashing led into a $60 product.
- andrei_says_ 6y agoAn epson home cinema projector, Apple TV and a $200 soundbar with subwoofer + a liter of neutral gray paint. Instant 8’ movie theater in the living room.
- nicbou 6y agoA small USB-C rechargeable LED lantern. It has 3 modes: warm light, cool light and RGB. It has only one capacitive button to turn it off (double tap) or adjust intensity (tap and hold). I bought it for my small balcony, but end up using it all the time. It's a great night light, reading light, ambiance light etc. It's also mobile. I honestly haven't fell in love like this with a product in years.