Synclip

You have a spreadsheet from a press office, a FOIA request or an open-data portal: 3,000 rows, 14 columns and a deadline. Getting a story out of it usually means an afternoon of pivot tables, then a chart tool, then a fight with the CMS.

Datastripes is a browser tool that shortens that afternoon. It reads the spreadsheet and drafts a data story from it, with headline findings, charts and the paragraphs that explain them, and you edit the draft the way an editor would. You still do the reporting. The tool takes the first pass through the data so you have more time for calls, context and copy.

The result

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Hi everyone, Oleks here, maker of BookTuning.

On Friday, Nov 6 we launch the BookTuning Reading Room: a free reading timer in your browser. You light a candle, read in sprints of 15 to 60 minutes (or anything from 5 to 120), and your book's Spotify playlist plays while you read and pauses for breaks. There are rain, fireplace and night-wind soundscapes, 20 pixel-art rooms, and a library card that tracks your pages and reading minutes. No account needed.

Before launch day, I'd love to know how you read:

1. What do you listen to while reading: a playlist that matches the book, ambient sound, or silence?

2. How long do you usually read in one sitting?

3. What would make a reading timer worth opening again tomorrow night?

I've been thinking a lot about how people collect information online.

Forms are everywhere: customer feedback, event registration, applications, surveys, contact pages, and more.

Yet building and managing them can still involve unnecessary friction.

I'm currently building Helios Gather, a form platform within the Helios Array ecosystem, and I want to understand what people actually need instead of making assumptions.