I am a musician. I use my phone for the things I can do while I'm outside the studio / with no access to an instrument. This means like listening to demos, taking notes on things I'd like to change, humming into the recorder app to save an idea for later, etc. So in that tine on a train, waiting for the doctor, etc., I consume my own stuff so I can possibly better create later.
Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're in line in the grocery store, not taking out your phone to fill those 30 seconds and just being there by yourself might be better for your creativity than opening an app and pretending that you have accomplished something in that time.
My opinion is that you’re wrong—30 seconds in the grocery line _is_ enough time to “accomplish something,” and Einstein / Toni Morrison / William Carlos Williams / etc were not merely “pretending” to be creative!
I agree with the GP that letting your mind wander in those situations is often better for creativity than trying to fill every minute with activity.
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#73Send physical postcards of photos you take with your phone. There are several apps that do this. It's surprisingly charming to receive a postcard by snail mail, and to send them. Take a photo, share a thought with someone, and participate in the delayed gratification that all previous generations have benefitted from.
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#74To be productive, you have to use the right tools in a distraction-free environment.
If you want to update one of the synths in a song you are working on, use your workstation.
If you want to procrastinate and waste time, then obsess over using your phone to do something it was never designed to do
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#75I rather enjoy writing longhand, and closest in feel to it is Dasher[0]. Don't get me wrong, keyboard entry is, in my opinion, a superior option for moving across large amount of text; and Dasher is indeed an accessibility writing system, but I like it's single-handed interface and _ex tempore_ feel that I also get from writing by hand. And the fact that the right hand side of the GUI is in fact a Borges' Library of…
I tried the Dasher app available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/dasher.android/ Not updated since 2013, but I guess that just means it's in a stable state. Trying to write with it was a trippy experience: just forging ahead without steering generated some interesting nonsense text, but even then it felt quite slow. Getting it to write exactly what I intended was rather challenging. (I did not have the patie…
Well, it's vocabulary grows to accommodate your writing habits. And nothing is ever erased, there is a txt file containing everything you've written. You can jump-start it with a txt collection of your particular writing style/lexicon.
For me, the speed is not an issue. I feel like the speed/responsiveness of the medium is inversely related to the length of the final text. Speed of light for the poetry, longhand for a novel. There is a reason why old prose is such a lengthy affair, and why it so often flirts with the letter writing trope. (That is probably anchored in the rhetoric schooling of the writers of old.)
N.B. I have been using only the desktop version of the Dasher. Nor did I use it to write this reply.
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#76- Stop animation
- Use with larger screen as a thin client to cloud
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#77This is a great question! I think other commenters miss the basic point that mobile is frictionless and can be used anywhere. I think OP is thinking along the following lines: I’m on the bus / in the loo / waiting for my lunch to heat in the microwave. How can I use these moments to produce creatively? I already have a great tool that I know can deliver content efficiently and accessibly to me in these situations—I u…
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. I feel your pain for writing. This morning, I accidentally deleted all my notes from yesterday and could not recover them from my phone because there is no undo (!!? How can phones still not have an undo?) in my note-taking app. I had to get up and recover the version from my desktop because I wasn't signed in to dropbox on my phone.
On iOS, three finger double tap, three finger swipe left, and shaking the phone — all undo. With a connected keyboard, Cmd-Z also works.
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#78On iOS I’d heavily recommend GrooveBox and (recently-released) Flip for creating tunes on the go. GrooveBox is synth driven, Flip is sample driven, and both are great at working on sketches in your free time. Before the pandemic, I spent many a bus-ride commute making short songs in GrooveBox.
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#79I use my iPhone 7 for a wide variety of creative video and audio projects. It's getting harder now though, because UI funnels that arrive with updates sometimes strip custom workflows I come up with. App developers seem to be moving to in-app purchases of preset packs instead of creative controls.
Here is a gallery of ~1 minute abstract videos with custom soundtracks. The apps I used were LumaFusion, Synthscaper, Fieldscaper, Defekt, FilterStack, Fragment, Kino Glitch, 8mm, Hyperspektiv, Plotagraph, and Virtual ANS.
https://lucidbeaming.com/glitch/
Here is a music video for U.K. metal band DAMIM that was made entirely on my phone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6OZVXYamOQ
I have also used the phone as a movement based MIDI controller with AC Sabre and arpeggiator with Fugue Machine.
An old code project was to make a phone based web app to control Zynaddsubfx (synthesizer) running on a Raspberry Pi. Fun learning project for Node.
Re: Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?
#80A lot of the comments are looking to find ways to get around the fact that entering text on a phone is a pain. Others have suggested creating 'art' but, personally I find a phone screen far too small for drawing on. If you want to 'create' with your phone, why not use the feature it has which is actually as good as [and in some aspects better than] the equivalent 'proper' equipment. ie. the camera. I'm a keen amateur…
> A lot of the comments are looking to find ways to get around the fact that entering text on a phone is a pain.
Years ago I bought a small, pricey bluetooth keyboard. It's been my companion in travels since then. Connecting takes a second and amount of time and hassle saved is enormous. Some people would call me strange ('oh, oh, nobody does that, you must be strange'). I couldn't care less. It's wonderful when flow strikes you... wherever.