Work smarter

"Work smarter, not harder" is the productivity hacker’s adage.

The motto is vague enough to mean anything but we approached it by looking at a few technologies you should be aware of and using, if you're not already.

Text recognition
Text recognition has made great progress over the past few years. Apple’s computer vision software, for example, can now identify objects inside images (like texts on signs) so you can search for things inside your photos on your iPhone. Apple's framework can be used by makers to add text recognition to apps. Flyscreen, for instance, lets you search and organize your screenshots by text (including opening links from them).

Text recognition isn’t limited to your iPhone. BLACKBOX lets you “select and copy text from anything. Ever.” Use cases in the launch last week highlight the ease of copy/pasting code from coding YouTube videos, but you can “copy text from anywhere in your browser. Could be a video, image, pdf, literally anything.”

Autocomplete
A team of makers launched their first app along their quest to make engineers and teams more productive — Fig is "autocomplete for the terminal.” For the non-technicals, the terminal is the black screen programmers use to accomplish and automate tasks. The tool adds visual completions for hundreds of public command-line interface tools. Completions are built by the community via an open-source GitHub repo.

Short Cuts
About that command line. We’ve seen a lot of love for it lately. We recently told you about Omni, a product from Golden Kitty Maker of the Year nominee, Alyssa X. It lets you perform all sorts of actions with a simple command interface on Chrome. We’ve also covered kbar and Raycast in this space. Since then, Raycast has shipped more time-saving features like snippets that will insert frequently used text for you (to circle back to autocomplete).

Fuzzy Search
If you’re ever searching your browsing history, frustrated because you can’t remember the exact word you used before, just know, that’s basically us daily. "Fuzzy search" can also be called approximate string matching. It means searching for text that matches a term closely instead of exactly, and Chikcamichi launched over the weekend with an extension that enables fuzzy search for your Chrome history, bookmarks, and tabs.

"One of the most effective ways to build a new habit is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior." – James Clear

The founders of identi realized that simply tracking your habits wasn’t enough, so they built a social network that helps people support and celebrate each other’s progress. Add accountability partners, connect with them, learn from experts, and join like-minded groups.

🍺 The IOU Beer Bot helps you show gratitude by letting your friends know you owe them a cold one, live on Twitter.

🌈 The Rainbow team launched Rainbow for Android, an ETH wallet to help manage your web3 assets.

📰 Troogl is a browser extension that provides real-time insights into news articles as you’re reading them.