You can't game your way out of the ludic loop any more than you can smoke your way out of a crack habit, but Katie Bloom's found some interesting apps that aim to help us take back control.
My favorite tool for doing this is Forest, an app that costs $1.99 and looks like it was designed for children, which is sort of pleasantly degrading. It’s been the #1 productivity app in the App Store for over a year; its only purpose is to help you stop touching your phone. Tap a button, sprout a little digital plant, and leave your phone alone until the allotted time is up. I use Forest every day, which has made me realize how often I pick up my phone for no reason, a feeling like walking into a room only to forget what I was planning to do there. It is depressing but instructive. As the stakes are technically nonexistent, I imagine this app is only truly useful for Catholics and others with a highly refined guilt palate.
Pixatool (previously), an excellent app that turns any image into perfectly-tuned pixel art, is already on its second edition: a complete rewrite that adds a much better user interface, can batch-process images, and can load restrictive palettes for all your peculiar 8-bit nostalgia needs (I’ll be making use of this to conform work to the […]
Dries Depoorter & David Surprenant’s Die With Me is a chat app available for iOS and Android, but only if your device is on its last legs: “The chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery. Die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace.”
Who needs mp4 and the mystery meat data within? Kornel Lesiński’s lossygif compresses GIF images, including animations, at the cost of noise. Though GIF does not offer true lossy compression, superimposing long horizontal lines of identical pixels gets the job done before encoding. Photoshop already does this, but this is better at it and it’s […]
Learning how to code is a great way to improve your hiring potential and open the door to more lucrative careers, but getting the ball rolling can be a bit daunting considering the number of languages out there and steep price associated with training. However, the Pay What You Want: Learn to Code 2018 Bundle is […]
Our world is a colorful one, and when it comes time to repaint the house or create a new design, many of us look to our surroundings for inspiration. However, matching colors from the outside world to our canvas isn’t the most precise process when we’re just eyeballing it. The Nix Pro Color Sensor removes the […]
You probably remember the Twisty Glass Blunt since we love to write about it. And you may also remember its little buddy, the Twisty Glass Mini. Well, today we’ve got a fun surprise that isn’t so little. Less isn’t always more, and on those days when you need to decompress with a good smoke, the Twisty XL […]
