Wonder Tools

Finding reliable services online can be time-consuming. So to help you strengthen your digital toolkit for 2024, I’m sharing a six-minute take on 7 of my favorites. (Watch on YouTube or above in this post). My aim is to save you hours spent weeding out clunkers. Read on for my preferred tools for journaling, creative interactive documents, exploring the Web, making lists and more. Create interactive documentsCoda is useful for creating simple documents as well as complex project plans. It works just like Google Docs but with additional capabilities. You can embed videos, maps, social media posts, tables, diagrams and buttons. You can link Coda docs to Slack or other services you use to streamline your work. I use Coda to manage projects, organize meeting notes, and sometimes for handouts. The paid plans add helpful AI capabilities — you can chat with your documents.Coda Doc Examples: a revenue database and my free digital teaching toolkit. Read more on how I use Coda.Keep a simple journal Day One is the best simple, easy-to-use, free app for digital journaling. My favorite features: keeping separate personal, reading and work journals; adding audio, video and photos; emailing-in entries or adding them on my phone; getting a printed journal mailed every other year. Alternatives: Other good options include Grid Diary and Apple’s own new Journal app. Read more on why Day One is my favorite + my Medium post: 9 ways to journalExplore the web enjoyablyArc is my favorite browser. It’s clean, simple, and free. You can create separate spaces for distinct projects. I have one for each class I teach, and for my primary research interests. I also like its annotation features for screenshots. Here’s an example. I prefer its appearance and functionality to Chrome, Firefox or Safari with no tabs up top. Just a clean view of the site you're visiting. New AI features allow you to get a quick summary of any article or site you visit. Read more about the 9 most useful Arc features Share lists of your favoritesListy is a simple mobile app for making lists. Type in your picks and the app automatically pulls in related images, like book or album covers. You can share a link to your visual lists. Examples: Bill Gates’s favorite books, Rolling Stones’s best 100 albums. Read what I like about the simplicity of Listy. Listium is more powerful free service online for compiling lists you share and publish — favorite books, games, or whatever else. Examples: Things to do in Sydney and the 100 highest-rated comedies on Netflix. Alternative: Glide also works well for making and sharing lists as little apps, like my favorite podcasts or journalists and publishers on TikTok. Build a timeline for a presentationThe Knight Lab’s TimelineJS makes it easy to create a compelling, interactive timeline you can share online. Include text, photos, and embedded YouTube videos or Wikipedia entries. Examples: The history of wine and The life of Whitney Houston. The service isn’t new, but still works well. Great alternatives: BeeDocs 3D (Mac), Genially and Venngage all have stellar timeline templates. More on why I recommend TimelineJS and when to use each alternativeBrainstorm with your voice Oasis is a useful AI-powered app that records, transcribes and cleans up your short voice memos. It’s one of the most fruitful $5 a month subscriptions I pay for. I use it to get raw ideas out of my head to avoid the blank paper problem. I just ramble on into my Airpods for a few minutes as I walk around the park. Oasis magically transforms my verbage into a neat summary, a helpful outline, and drafts of a newsletter post, a video script, or whatever else I’m working on.Read why I rely on Oasis and six ways to use it Backup, organize and share photosGoogle Photos is a classic and remains my tool of choice for photo backup, search, sharing and printing. It’s faster and more flexible than Apple’s photo service, which I also use. I like being able to find any of my photos by typing in a name, place, or even a detail like “NYC,” “skiing,” or “pizza.” I use GPhotos to edit and share photos. I’ve even used it while teaching, having students create shared albums for a live photo sharing project. My wife orders printed family photo books twice a year and the quality is good.What are your go-to apps at the start of 2024? Leave a comment 👇p.s. Make something new this spring! You’re invited to apply to join the 2024 cohort of the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program. This is the 100-day fully-online program I direct at the City Univ. of NY’s Newmark Grad School of Journalism. Participants join from all over the world at all career stages. RSVP to join a live open-house Jan 10. Read more and apply by Feb 2. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

In this week’s Wonder Tools I’m experimenting with an audio post.Nikita Roy recently interviewed me for her Newsroom Robots podcast. I’m sharing the conversation with you to give you a window into the AI tools I find most useful with explanations of how and why I use them.During the conversation I share my AI experiments and thoughts on:* How Claude offers a powerful alternative to ChatGPT for long documents (~5:55 in the audio)* Why I tried Woebot & Personal.ai to stretch my thinking (~3:54)* My four Fs checklist for testing new AI tools (~20:45)Interview excerpt audiogram made with Hypernatural, an impressive new AI tool I’ll write about in a future post. https://youtu.be/FehWNSvpq2g?si=07l6U7kbE5LDn1hWTools used in making this audio post* Squadcast for recording the interview. (I also like Riverside.fm for recording)* Shure MV7 microphone* Adobe podcast for recording the opening supplemental audio clip* Audacity for merging audio clips* Hypernatural for generating the audiograms* Claude for identifying potentially interesting moments in the transcript* Substack for newsletter and audio delivery10 Takeaways on AI* Alternatives to ChatGPT are worth exploring. Personal.ai and Woebot are in a growing category of new AI assistants that can serve as conversational partners. They aim to provide comfort or companionship and to get to know you over time. Update: Woebot recently announced that its app will no longer be available after November 30, 2023. (~3:54 in the audio)* Claude’s superpower is ingesting giant texts I find Claude's ability to analyze large uploaded documents (up to 75,000 words) useful. I can have Claude summarize key points from a research paper to help me learn from it more efficiently. (~6:01)Below is the post I wrote about this: https://wondertools.substack.com/p/claude* I made a little French bot... I created a simple FrenchGuru language bot with Poe to explain French grammar and phrases. (~8:02)Other Poe bots I created you can use for free: - 6WordSummary sums up anything in six words- MemoryAid gives you a mnemonic device for whatever you want to recall.- BotanyBlair gives you interesting info about any plant + a two-line poem. - EthicalJourno responds to queries based on the ethical principles of the Society of Professional Journalists.Here’s the post I wrote about this: https://wondertools.substack.com/p/poe * AI can be useful as an experimental email assistant. The AI reviews my past writing to understand my style. When I lack time for a from-scratch response to every cold email, I can provide phrases and have Superhuman AI stitch together a draft, allowing me to spend time editing rather than composing all email from scratch. (~14:52)RSVP to join me on November 28 at 3pm ET for a live demo of Shortwave, another email tool incorporating AI creatively: https://lu.ma/novshortwave * Multimedia AI tools are worth exploring. Tools like Runway ML, Kapwing, and Descript use AI to streamline video editing and creation. Why I find Descript so useful: (~23:12)* AI tools should provide clearer guidance to users. Until recently, services like ChatGPT and Claude basically gave you a blank box and invited you to figure out what to do. (~25:20)* New AI tools like 4149.ai have creative features that can summarize classes and allow students to 'query' the AI with questions about session content. It's like having an assistant who memorized every word. (~31:40)* I use an AI app called Bloks to generate meeting summaries and notes on conference sessions. This allows me to focus on listening and thinking rather than manual note-taking. (~34:12) p.s. I also use and recommend Fathom (as a reader/friend you can skip the waitlist) for time-coded meeting summaries: https://fathom.video/invite/tq29sg * AI can eventually help provide more customized journalism education. I see AI as helpful for creating adaptive learning materials tailored to each student's language, culture, interests, and project work. (~36:16)* AI can reduce some of the sting of menial tasks. AI can help with manual tasks in the journalism workflow — like analyzing datasets, scanning notes to find mentions of a topic, and more. (~37:37)Join Nikita and me in an upcoming AI masterclass🔔 Introducing the Generative AI for Media Pros Masterclass A Wonder Tools + Newsroom Robots collaborationFind out more and sign up for one of the limited spots. It’s hands-on, small-cohort with one-on-one guidance: https://maven.com/nikita-roy/generative-ai-for-media-professionals I’ll co-lead this live cohort-based course alongside Nikita Roy, the journalist, data scientist, media entrepreneur and host of the Newsroom Robots podcast, who interviewed me for this audio post.Check out recent Wonder Tools posts on AI: https://wondertools.substack.com/t/ai … And check out the Newsroom Robots podcast for more from Nikita Roy: https://www.newsroomrobots.com/ I’d love your feedback on this audio post. Hit reply to reach me or email jeremy at jeremycaplan dot com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wondertools.substack.com/subscribe

Shortform gives you concise summaries of books you haven’t had time yet to read. In 15 minutes you’ll grasp a book’s core ideas. You can then decide to read the full book if it resonates. Shortform covers 30+ genres but focuses on business, tech, self-improvement, spirituality, history, and politics. My summary take: I appreciate the thorough, smart summaries weaving in ideas from related books, but given the alternatives, I wish more books were covered and that the app and site were more robust.Smart summariesThankfully the write-ups aren’t automated. Shortform hires smart people to read and reflect on these books. I find the summaries to be clear and well-written. Start with a one-minute quick guide for a book you’re curious about. Then optionally dig deeper with a 15-minute full summary.See how a book is connected to othersOne of the things I like best about Shortform is that the summaries tie together related books. I recently read the summary of Decisive, by Chip and Dan Heath, a book I read several years ago. I wanted a reminder about the key ideas. I appreciated the summary’s references to several other books on decision-making, from The Art of Choosing and The Paradox of Choice to Thinking in Bets and Thinking Fast and Slow. Other summary services focus on the book itself but don’t bring in parallel helpful references that show how a book fits into the broader field of thinking.Short activities to apply books’ ideasAnswer short questions the platform supplies within its summaries to apply the ideas in a book to your own life. In the Decisive summary, for example, I was prompted to consider an upcoming decision and to analyze various aspects through the lens of the book’s frameworks. As a teacher, I appreciate this extra step to help me retain the information and ideas.Mobile, Web and exportable highlightsI like reading the book summaries on my phone, but you can also read them on the Web. You can make highlights within a summary and sync these to Notion or Readwise. Here’s why I love Readwise for my book and online reading highlights.Articles, not just booksIn addition to book summaries Shortform publishes short explainers on diverse topics — from cryptocurrency to psychedelics. The summary pieces are smart, authoritative and reference numerous academic and media sources. But I don’t consider these to be comprehensive — they’re usually primers to help you get started on a topic.📖 2 brief excerpts from Shortform summariesSprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden KowitzElement #3: Building Your Team — “According to Knapp, Zeratksy, and Kowitz, your sprint team should have no more than seven members. Having more than seven hinders the decision-making process and makes it difficult to maintain the group's attention. Start by picking two essential roles, which they call the Decider and the Facilitator. For clarity, we'll call them the team leader and the sprint coordinator…“A World Without Email by Cal NewportOur Current Approach to Work: The Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow — Newport argues that most knowledge workers structure their work days around responding to unscheduled emails and instant messages rather than around the knowledge work they were hired to do. A 2019 study showed that the average employee sent and received 126 emails a day, and another study showed that employees check their instant messenger app once a minute on average and their inboxes 77 times a day. A third study indicated that many knowledge workers can only perform about an hour of uninterrupted knowledge work a day. The rest of their day is spent responding to a barrage of incoming emails and messages…”Limitations and ConsiderationsLimited book selectionThe service is still young, so the library of summaries isn’t yet robust. Because they cover a wide range of subjects, no topic is comprehensively covered. And because they work methodically to create thoughtful summaries, the production process is slow. A handful of new books are added weekly. There are many books I’d love to have summaries of that aren’t available, both contemporary and classic. Shortform works best if you enjoy discovering new books, not just searching for specific book summaries.Opinionated writeupsThe summarizers aim to position each book among others. That results, sometimes, in summaries that are a blend of summary and analysis. In summarizing A World Without Email, the team omitted a section of the book about the history of email because they decided it wasn’t crucial to the book’s primary message. I generally don’t object to these excisions, because anyone summarizing has to make such decisions. But if you prefer a straightforward section-by-section textual summary with less independent analysis and fewer external references, you might prefer one of the alternatives below, like Headway or Uptime.Minimalist app and siteThe app and site are functional but simple. You can search for books and read summaries, but don’t expect much more. A neat audio feature means you can now listen to some of the summaries, but otherwise the app and site are basic. In comparison with the flashy visual summary apps below, Shortform is vanilla. But if you’re focused on depth of thought and analysis, the visuals may matter less.CostSummaries are expensive to produce, because humans make them and it takes lots of time to read deeply and write well. So Shortform costs $24/month, though they’ve agreed to a Wonder Tools reader discount, which brings the price down to $12.97/month for an annual subscription. For some people that’s still a lot, and other options below are cheaper.AlternativesBlinkist is the most famous of the summary services, claiming 23 million users, with an average rating of 4.76 stars after >100,000 app store reviews. A vast library means I was able to find summaries of many of the books by Alain de Botton, one of my favorite authors. And there’s some original learning material here, like an audio guide to slow productivity by YouTuber Rowena Tsai. Two other features I like: I can share my account free with a friend or family member. And I can send summaries straight to my Kindle. Cost: $100/yearHeadway This service’s visual explainers are its strength. Tap through a series of cards to grasp core book ideas or complex concepts. I like that the 15-minute book summaries are broken into 10 easy-to-digest cards, with short quotes pulled out as “insights” that you can save, share or add to your notebook in the app. Note that the summaries aren’t as thorough as Shortform’s at incorporating references to other books. The 39 question onboarding online is a bit too much. Cost: $60/yearUptime offers 5-minute “hacks” for getting a quick sense of books, podcasts, online courses, and documentaries. Like Headway, the app mixes in visuals in an appealing way, so you feel like you’re swiping through an educational Instagram, rather than reading dense text. You tap through screens just as you do on social platforms. You can switch audio on or off to listen to the summary. Occasionally a short video pops up, like a 30-second clip of author Mark Manson talking about concepts in his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Cost: $56/year This is a public episode. 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