Riia Jarvenpaa

Honestly, I spent a weekend with the HEX templates for exploratory data analysis, and my understanding of the field went from 0 to a working deployment with Python.

I like these simple faces much more than stock photo people or AI creations. These go well as placeholders, or in your prototype. They have great no-nonsense Figma plugin.

I use Notion as my primary note taking tool, so obviously I need a handy web clipper. This is the best one I've tried, and I've tried many. You can create endless amount of templates for saving web page content to different databases, arrange these to folders, and can customise whether you want just a bookmark, or clip the whole page content, import automatically page description icon, cover or content pics. You can also take manual screenshots of a page area, full page, or pick a imagine from the page. And you can choose which database properties are shown in the template and add data in them when using the template. It’s free, and the devoloper is responsive and helpful if you have any problems with the extension.

I think Google has forgotten that they have a browser also. The mobile version works fine, but e.g. lacks integrations to other apps. Keeping the bookmark library sane is hard. The desktop version has plenty of useful extensions provided by third parties, but the extension store is a mess.

This tool has been created ages ago, but it just plain works. If you can have the image URL ending in .jpg, just add it to the tool, and there you go: 10 most used colors get extracted. Obviously, the UI is from another era, it can't process pics that as embedded in pages via complex plugins etc. But it doesn't matter.

It does just what it says: batch edits font and color styles in Figma. E.g. if you have several font styles and your want to change the size or spacing, just run the plugin, select the ones you want to edit, and that's it.

For me, finding Notion was really a game-changer in how I organise my notes, to-do's and even academic research. One of the best parts is the thriving community, with members giving also free advise and templates. They also offer growing number of integrations to other apps. There's a bit of a learning curve in using Notion, although using the basic features is really straight-forward. Using the more advanced features such as functions can felt a bit frustrating at first, since I expected them to work as functions do in Excel or Google Sheets - which was a wrong idea, since Notion databases are actual databases, not just sheets of information. There are of course plenty of things which could be improved - for example a native proper integration with calendar, possibility to link to files or folders in your computer and so on. The product is also developing fast, which is of course a good thing. It's just sometimes frustrating when the new features make your present setups obsolete. And the official documentation feels sometimes limited.

Figma is a UI and prototyping tool, not a graphic design tool, they say. But I use it for creating all sorts of visual assets - e.g. social media posts. With Figma it's easy to replicate and variate components, and it gives more room to creativity than the actual graphic-design-tools-for-people-who-are-not-graphic designers.

I've been trying to find a robust, straight-forward and versatile platform for hosting information for an NGO project I'm working with as a hobby, preferably open source and free since we are are volunteers in this project. Logseq is all of those, and actually offers really versatile features. To use the more advanced queries there is a bit of a learning curve and the documentation is partially a bit thin, but its understandable since it is an open source project and evolving fast.