Try These New Sites — Wonder Tools
Introducing Wakeout, Workona, Jumprope.ai, and other useful new May resources
Welcome! Today’s Wonder Tools post has some new resources to help you:
🏅 Stretch in a fun, quick way during work breaks
🎧 Listen to music from across the globe on one page👂
⌛️ Make your browser work better for you
Catching Up: It’s hard to keep up w/ newsletters, so here are my 2 priors:
- Catch up on last week’s post about the most useful new video editing tools.
- The post before that included a surprisingly useful AI tool to make writing easier.
If you haven’t yet subscribed — or someone forwarded this to you— subscribe
Stretch at your desk with Wakeout
Of the dozens of fitness apps I’ve experimented with, this is the most practical and useful for day-to-day quick work breaks. This week Wakeout launched version 5, much improved from the app that Apple awarded app of the year in 2020. It now has 1,500+ mini exercises you can do at your desk. No equipment or exercise skill needed (I don’t have any). Little gifs show you what to do, featuring real people, not pro athletes. Exercise breaks can be as quick as 30 seconds or as long as 10 minutes.
Some new features I like:
— Set recurring exercise alarms to remind yourself
— Filter out body parts to get the exercises that suit you
— A “relief” section focuses on back, shoulder, and neck pain
— Wakeout has special ✋ hand and 👀eye exercises. That’s useful for those of us who type a lot and stare at work screens.
— There’s a new kids section with silly exercises
— Wakeout costs $35/year subscription for up to 10 people to share, which I find to be a fair price to pay great developers for something I now use daily.
Alternatives: If you just want a reminder to pause and stretch, Time Out is a free Mac app I like that shows exercise gifs at the break intervals you set. Workrave is a free Windows/Linux alternative. For 7-minute workouts I use and recommend the free official 7-Minute Workout app, for iOS or Android.
🎶 Sample global music with Every Noise
Every Noise lets you click on any musical style you see to hear what it sounds like. Thanks to my brother Jonathan for suggesting this one. Here’s a peek at what the page looks like👇 You just click on something to hear it.
Share this post with a friend or on your social of choice 🎁
Tame your 29 browser tabs — Workona
Workona helps tame the dozens of tabs I tend to keep open. It lets you create workspaces - basically collections of sites. You can then open or close a batch of sites as needed, depending on what you’re working on. When you switch tasks — say from email to a particular project— a quick keystroke switches you to the relevant tab group. You can share groups of sites with colleagues if you’re collaborating. And there's a built-in tab "suspender." That ensures your browser runs fast by focusing on the sites you're actually using. One bonus: you can save sites you don’t need now but may reference later in resource sections associated with a tab group.
Alternatives: Onetab is a simple free browser add-on that just closes and saves all your tabs at the end of the day. It works with Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge and you can install with a click. tabExtend, described below, is another good free option.
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Guest tips from reader Rahul Chowdhury
Rahul Chowdhury from Bangalore, India, works at a Southeast Asian company called Gojek as an Android Engineer. Rahul writes the excellent Hulry Newsletter, which I just discovered, where he curates and features top-quality apps, articles and books every Friday to help you become 1% better every week. Subscribe now for free.
I like all three of the tools he recommends below 👇 - JC
Navigate faster with Jumprope
Jumprope lets you perform common actions like creating a new calendar invite, searching for something on Amazon or searching your Google Drive for a file by typing out commands in Chrome’s address bar.
You can start with some predefined actions like:
gd: Search your Google Drive
m1: Open your primary Gmail inbox
m2: Open your secondary Gmail inbox
tr: Google Translate a word
c1 new: Create a new calendar invite
When you feel the need to add more shortcut commands, Jumprope allows you to create custom commands on its settings page.
If you’ve ever used Alfred on macOS, Jumprope will feel similarly powerful.
Slash commands with gSweets
gSweets lets you use slash commands in Google Docs.
Slash commands allow you to insert formatting and elements in your document without breaking your typing flow.
Type a / and a menu comes up to add various elements to your document. If you’ve used modern editors like Notion or Dropbox Paper, you know how powerful slash commands are.
Here’s what it looks like:
As of now, with gSweets, you can use slash commands to insert:
- Headings
- Lists
- Links
- Tables
- Images
- Images from Unsplash
- GIFs
Once you get the hang of slash commands, you’ll never go back to toolbars.
Organize tabs into boards with tabExtend
Have too many open tabs on Google Chrome?
tabExtend lets you close and organize your tabs into Kanban-like lists for future reference. You can drag & drop tabs into lists, & rearrange tabs from one list to another. Here’s how it looks:
Apart from saving a reference to your tabs for later, tabExtend also closes each tab you add to a list. This saves memory and helps Chrome work faster.
Too many documents to review? Add them to a list using tabExtend and get to them when you have the time.
Want to keep reading? Check out posts to improve your slides, have a great ☀️ morning or make quick 📱videos. The full archive is here for whatever you need.
Have a fruitful day 🍇🍓,
Jeremy