3 apps that made me shout ‘WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?’ 🤯

_{Day 149/100}

Hey—It's Tim.

Ever switch to a new tool and immediately think:

I chase that lightning-bolt feeling like a caffeine-addled magpie.

Here are my three most recent “where-have-you-been” finds - and, sneak peek, that’s exactly the reaction I’m engineering for Penfriend.

More Lovable… giving my dev a break

I’ve finally admitted the truth: every time I hurl a “feature idea” over Slack, it lands as a steaming bowl of alphabet soup in JIRA.

As a bunch of you may know, I’ve been building things in Lovable.

So, we came up with a new rule. “If it’s a new feature, I have to make a version first”

Any time I have an idea I can spin up a prototype in a matter of hours. And get that sent over to our dev same day.

Two things.
One, we can move fast. Much faster.
Two, if I don’t think it’s worth the 3 hours to build. I bench it.

We have less features now. But more better-er ones.

Vivaldi Browser. The Arc rebound

Arc hit pause, my tabs staged a coup, and my brother whispered, “Just try Vivaldi.”
Twelve hours later:

• Workspaces = instant context switch (SEO spreadsheet → BoFu swipe file).

• Mouse gestures = wizard vibes; no more trackpad yoga.

• Sync that actually syncs—phone, laptop, even the dusty Windows rig I use for streaming Age of Empires.

It’s one of the few things I can actually say has made me more productive.

Verdict: feels like the browser Arc wanted to be before the snacks ran out.

It can be a little overwhelming. It’s incredibly powerful. Took me a few days to get it set up as I like it. I am still tweaking it.

Obsidian… giving my notes a home-cooked meal

Coda is still my HQ, but I wanted a cabin in the woods for raw ideas - no internet, no team comments, just me and my second brain.

Fourth time adopting Obsidian and it finally clicked:

1 vault
Para + Zettlekasten system for folders
Daily note for the nonsense, plugins on probation.

Local files = I own the keys, search is instant, and the graph view makes my thought spaghetti look almost Michelin.

Biggest breakthrough for me is a global hotkey to the daily note. And then writing almost everything in there as checkboxes.

Use the tasks plugin to roll them all up and I get that magic “I can capture anything at the speed of though and it not get lost” feeling I’ve been after for a while.

My product north star

That mouth-open “WHY WASN’T I USING THIS?” rush always has two beats:

1. Out-of-the-box magic. A headline feature erases a nagging pain the second you launch.
   

2. Just-enough blank space. A quick round of tinkering - custom hotkeys in Vivaldi, vault tweaks in Obsidian, friendlier copy in our app - and the tool feels like it was built for you.

Hit both notes and you’ve got lightning in a jar. That’s the bullseye I’m painting for Penfriend: instant win first, then get out of your way while you twist the knobs until it hums in your own accent. Anything less heads back to the workbench.

Quick gut-check: which tools in your stack nail that one-two punch, and which ones are still faceless roommates on your dock?

✌️ Tim "Hotkey Gremlin" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. For my obsidian people out there, gimme your favourite plugins. I’m in that era where I’m adding everything…

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