Multiplayer art

Happy Friday! I hope your week has been as good as mine! In today’s digest, I’m covering an app that’s all about making art multiplayer. But first…

The headlines: 

🔐 OpenAI has released a safety assessment of its latest GPT-4o model. 

💬 Perplexity has answered 250M queries in July compared to 500M in all of 2023.

🛍️ TikTok and Pinterest are partnering with Amazon for in-app shopping.

Remember r/place? For those who might be scratching their heads right now, it’s a special community event organized by Reddit. Initially launched in 2017, it allowed Reddit users to unite on an infinite canvas to create art — one pixel at a time. It’s pretty fun, and there are some impressive collaborative art feats. 

The sad part is that while it has become somewhat of an annual event, it’s only ever for a short time. That’s why Sean Gransee, a freelance engineer and solo founder, spent two years building and shipping Everyone Draw. 

Everyone Draw is an iOS, Android, and web app that lets you connect with over 285,000 other artists all over the world and draw alongside them. Since its initial launch, a total of 330 million individual pixels have been placed. It works the same way as r/place. Everyone starts with a pixel. You can swap out the color and place it wherever you want. Once you do, the countdown starts. For me, it was only thirty seconds. Once that’s up, you can place your next pixel and so on. 

Similar to r/place, the community has made it its mission to create masterpieces out of pixels. While scrolling through the canvas, I stumbled upon a city built by the community, and my first thought was, “Yeah, I could live here.” 

As mentioned, Sean has been building Everyone Draw for about two years. With the latest update, he’s added several new features to make it even more delightful, including a live view to watch other people draw, a timelapse function, and bookmarks for your favorite drawings. 

Mebot is an AI app that uses ‘large personal models’ to capture and analyze your thoughts and better understand you. Over time, it becomes kind of like a synthetic coach for all of life’s ups and downs. The team relies on a bunch of different technologies to power it. Let’s dive in: 

React Native is one of the most popular frameworks for creating apps. The Mebot team uses it to build cross-platform applications. 

“It allows us to create natively-rendered mobile applications for iOS and Android using the same codebase. This cross-platform solution accelerates development speed and reduces costs without sacrificing performance.”

Assembly AI builds powerful speech-based models. The Mebot team uses them to power its speech recognition and transcription features. 

“AssemblyAI offers an advanced, easy-to-integrate speech recognition API that excels in transcribing audio data accurately. It supports a range of media types! Super handy to use.”

Gamma is a platform for quickly creating engaging slide decks. This has come in handy, particularly for the Mebot marketing team.

“Making the life of the marketing team much easier. A paradigm of how AI transforms our life.” 

TOOLS FOR MAC 

Cleanslate is a Mac app that helps you present and screen share with confidence by hiding sensitive information and decluttering your desktop.

TOOLS FOR MARKETING 

Spok helps you uncover hidden growth opportunities with data-driven insights powered by artificial intelligence.

Fucimo is a platform that allows you to build your online store, showcase your content, and manage your ad sales. 

TOOLS FOR DEVELOPERS

Waydev is a coding intelligence platform that leverages insights from the engineering stack to improve health, accelerate delivery, and enhance planning.

RegexBot uses AI to let you convert natural language to RegEx in seconds. Just type in what pattern you’re looking for, hit enter, and the AI will do the rest.