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Scott Brownlee

middlespot

#593267@scott_brownleemiddlespot.com

Activity 2 Made 2 Hunted 544 Following 100 Followers

Upvotes (36)

Joined on June 28th, 2016

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Marketing, Growth Hacking, Developer Tools

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Hi everyone, I wanted to share the reason we've been building middlespot. It's not for everyone, but the people who do use it on a regular basis (multiple times a day) sure seem to love it. I'm a pretty visual person. If you looked at my desk, you'd think it was a strange organizational mess. It definitely doesn't look like a grid or list view you'd find in a cloud folder. It's how I work, with little clusters and stacks of stuff placed where I know where things are. But I couldn't find anything that would let me do the same thing for all my digital resources. I'd be restricted to either long, scrolling lists of bookmarks, or cloud folders that just gave me thumbnails of files organized the way the platform dictated. I wanted something where I could keep pretty much anything (files, weblinks, photos, and even widgets) grouped in little clusters, basically curated into the piles that worked for me. We looked at a number of methods to display content and landed on a cartesian plane. We are all familiar with maps (and navigating online maps). You get a two dimensional space that you can pan in any direction, and zoom in and out of to get more granular. Instead of zooming in on towns or cities, you are zooming in on groupings of your digital resources. When you think about it, it's kind of what your desk/workspace is. Look from afar and you see all the stuff on your desk, then focus in on one section (maybe your keyboard or your notebook or your carkeys) to do the task at hand. So, a middlespot desktop is a digital cartesian surface you can place, group, cluster, and curate a whole range of digital resources. The neat thing about a cartesian plane is that is also restricts what can be there. It is after all a method for displaying a scare resource, space. This helps focus what you put on your middlespot desktop. Since its not an endless stack of nested folders and files, you are more particular as to what should be on your desktop, just like in real life. It's why, for me, it's about 'keeping what's important at your fingertips'. Resources you refer to multiple times a day or week or you want to just keep top of mind. I have three desktops I refer to throughout my day. One is a list of all the websites and tools I use to code and work on UX/UI (it's mostly websites like materialdesign, code snippets, etc). The second is my daily tools (banking websites, blog websites, quickbooks, facebook and twitter widgets, hotjar, intercom, slack, articles I want to read, and PDFs on various topics), basically stuff that I need to access daily or know I want to read soon. The third is a shared desktop with the other makers of middlespot, where we all can contribute to shared project plans (google doc files), timesheets (google sheet file), some financial widgets, notes, and links to important login pages for the third party tools we use to manage middlespot. Middlespot desktop collaboration isn't our focus. Again, just like in the real world, at least for me, my desk workspace is a highly personal space, and I don't really share it with others. But there are use cases where a shared desktop on middlespot helps. If you are just starting out with a middlespot desktop, I'd suggest making one out of the resources you find important and refer too multiple times during the day. This could be a collection of websites you like to visit, a facebook and twitter feed widget, a couple of documents you are working on or reference. Then add that middlespot desktop to your browser bookmark bar so it's easy to open in a tab (and leave open) every day. Like I said at the beginning, freeform organization may not be your thing. But I think for those of us who are most productive this way, you might find middlespot right up your alley. Thanks, Scott P.S. some people may wonder why you can only sign into middlespot using a google account. We did this for three big reasons - one it means all your content is stored on your google drive so you always have full control, it never sits on our servers - two it means only you can access your desktop (we can't even view your desktop if we wanted to) - and three it means we can integrate really deep into the services you use on google and bring them to your desktop. P.P.S yes, middlespot is free. We don't have any subscription restricted features.

3yr ago

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by Scott Brownlee