😸 Everyone’s an author

Happy Friday! I hope you all had a great week and Fourth of July to those who celebrated. In today’s digest, I’m covering a new self-publishing tool built by the makers of Basecamp. But first…

The headlines: 

🍎 The next Apple Homepod could have a screen and Apple Intelligence.

💻 A hacker broke into OpenAI’s internal messaging last year to steal secrets.

💰 Softbank plans to borrow $10billion to fund some AI-related projects. 

Since the internet burst onto the scene, creating and publishing short-form written content has become increasingly easier. People have blogs, newsletters, Twitter threads, and more that make it seamless to publish short content and monetize it. 

With all that content, you might wonder, why not turn it into a web book? I mean, a few well-written essays can be a book. It’s kind of hard. You’d normally have to set up your own website, complete with its own easy-to-navigate HTML structure, or get hacky with an existing CMS. It’s not ideal, and the makers behind Writebook know that. 

Writebook was built by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of Basecamp, Hey, and more. Together, they’ve published several different web-books and it’s through the trials and tribulations of that experience that they decided to make it easier for everyone. 

It’s a simple platform for handling all the nitty-gritty of publishing web-based books. It’s not a service, it’s a downloadable software that you can self-host. Once its set up, you can start crafting your new web book from cover to cover. You can add title and content pages, pictures, walls of text, and whatever else that makes a book a book. 

The simplicity carries over in its setup as well. According to the announcement, once you sign up, the team will email you a single command you can copy and paste into the terminal to get up and running. From there, Writebook takes care of the rest, and no real maintenance is required. It even self-updates. 

Writebook is currently free so if you’ve been itching to gather up all those essays and blog posts and turn them into a book, it might be worth a shot.

FOR PRODUCTIVITY 

Impulse is a Chrome extension designed to help you reclaim your focus. With Impulse, you can block specified websites during time slots to maintain focus and productivity.

Rain Screen is a simple Mac app designed to help you focus or clear your mind. When you booth it up, gentle rain will start playing across your Mac screen to help you focus on whatever task at hand.

FOR DEVELOPERS 

Builderkit helps you ship an AI SaaS product super fast with pre-built AI tools, landing pages, and a comprehensive NextJS boilerplate

SnippetEase is a free code snippet generator. You can create your own code snippet with its own style that you can easily embed anywhere.