🍪 #12 - AI and focus mode are just one tap away
Knowledge doesn't have to be boring and saying goodbye to Artifact
Hi,
and welcome again to Little Bites, my weekly bite on apps, tech, shortcuts, …
This week I would like to talk about an iPhone quick action to access AI and focus modes, how AI helped make my note-taking app more colourful and appealing and saying good to Artifact.
Happy reading,
Steven
Reading time: 5 minutes to chew through.
Before I start, don’t forget about the free 2 months of Apple TV that will expire on the 18th.
👈 AI and focus modes are just a tap away
I have always tried to make my iPhone as clean and functional as possible. I get goosebumps when I see people's phones with pages full of apps and folders with pages of apps, making it impossible to find anything (like my girlfriend’s phone).
When I swipe right I have my today view where I have some useful widgets with shortcuts, membership cards, weather and a shopping list.
Then I have my home screen with the apps I need the most (only 1 page), and for everything else, I swipe left for the app library (or use search). As I mentioned earlier, focus modes have been an eye-opener for me. This has been such a productivity boost for me. Based on time or location I now have all the apps and widgets I need, removing everything that could be a distraction.
Of course, there is always room for improvement. In getting a new iPhone 15 I got an action button instead of the silent mode switch, to which you can assign an action or shortcut, which got me thinking what to use it for.
However, even with older models, you can trigger custom actions and shortcuts.
And this via the double- or triple-tap on the back of your phone.
You can enable those via Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap
So what did I put behind these actions?
Double-tap is linked to a shortcut which is a menu to the AI chatbots I want quick access to.
And triple-tap is linked to a shortcut that allows me to quickly switch focus mode.
Are you already using double- and triple-tap?
What action did you link to them?
🎨 Giving my notes some colour
🏷️ AI
I have 1000+ notes in Obsidian and I'm extremely proud of them. They help me remember and expand my knowledge, but the best of it all is that I have almost 3 years of daily notes. So every day when I'm writing I can look back at what I did and wrote each year ago.
Over the last few weeks, I started working on my notes again as I moved back from Logseq to Obsidian (which is a better fit when it comes to writing and multi-device syncing support), removing some and adding properties for easy access.
But notes don't have to be boring.
With some theming, you can make your notes look nice, but I wanted to do something more and have these revised notes stand out. That's when I thought of using banners to emphasise their meaning and importance. And what better tools to support this than AI?
And while you have great paid tools for this, I wanted to stick to free alternatives only.
I see my "vault" as a treasure so I quickly had the idea to theme it as a treasure hunt, discovering valuable gems with each step I take. The idea of "Indiana Jones" came to mind, but to found it difficult to come to a good prompt for this. Of course, this is also where AI can help.
I turned to Poe and used their Midjourney bot to generate a prompt.
With my simple request "generate an image to show a vault of knowledge, Indiana Jones walking in with a torch in his hand in awe of all the knowledge" the bot generated an extensive prompt describing the whole scene that I could use for the image generation.
I then turned to Copilot (with Dall-E) with the prompt, generating some images and adjusting the prompt until I was satisfied with the results.
While the images were looking good they had one downside as they come in a square format (1024×1024), while for my vault I need rectangular banners.
So, as a final step, I turned to Fooocus (which I wrote about earlier) to "outpaint" and create banner-type images from the images generated by Dall-E.
And with that, I now have some notes that look a lot better and more appealing.
Have you done something similar?
What tools would you use for creating nice-looking AI banners?
😢 Saying goodbye to Artifact
🏷️ Apps
A few days ago when opening Artifact I saw their article they would shut down due to a reduced market opportunity and the sustainability of keeping the app and team active.
I was shocked as I didn't see this coming and enjoyed this app, not thinking it would come to this.
Ok, it made me lazy in reading articles due to the summary feature (which I recreated via ChatGPT and Perplexity), but it was their posts section that made me come back every day.
Artifact posts helped me learn about hidden gems, and useful apps, got me into RSS again, helped me learn about focus modes,... The list goes on.
On top, posts allowed me to publish content and reach people without the need to play the social media algorithm game.
I will truly miss Artifact and the people it helped me discover.
And you, how do you feel about this news?
Where will you now turn to for consumption and publishing?
If you like what you’re reading, hit the like and subscribe button and get my next update directly in your inbox or read later app of your choice.
And if you want to support me, you can Buy me a 🍵 Tea. I don’t drink coffee.