You should be too — they’re going to be big

I come across a lot of apps and services, many of which seem promising but don’t get me particularly excited. Every once in a while, a few gems emerge that I can’t wait to get my hands on.

Here are three of them.

Glass: A Healthy New Community for Photographers

What if Instagram was built by photographers? That’s Glass, in a nutshell.

Glass is an alternative to Instagram that’s designed to be safe, inclusive, beautiful, and focused. Privacy is respected and money comes from users, so the platform’s needs are in alignment with its users’ needs — as it should be.

A few details that stood out to me:

• No visible counts or endless notifications
• No damaging image compression
• A simple, chronological feed
• Display of EXIF data

Glass isn’t the first service to attempt this, but they’re the most promising I’ve seen so far.

Play: A Mobile App for Building Mobile Apps

In mobile product design, there’s an inherent disconnect between the design tool and the final outcome: you sketch and prototype and build on your desktop machine, then you test on a mobile device separately.

Current tools focus on bridging this gap with sophisticated companion apps, mobile-friendly prototype links, and so on. But it’s just that: a bridge. Play erases the gap entirely, putting the design tool on the output device itself.

Using Play, you build out your app on the device that it will actually run on. This eliminates friction but, more importantly, it allows the designer to be embedded in the headspace and physical limitations of the target platform at every stage. Ideally, this leads to fewer situations where something looks fine on a desktop mockup but feels strange or unintuitive when you actually try it out on your mobile device.

Play has the potential to meaningfully change the way mobile products are prototyped and built, and the depth and thoughtfulness of its on-device design tools are a wonder to behold.

Quill Chat: Team Messaging

Another messaging app? Well…yes.

Quill is designed as a thread-based, anti-distraction communication layer for modern teams. Its design drew me to it initially, but there are also a number of smart features like seamless SMS compatibility, single-account access to multiple teams (like Discord vs. Slack), and cross-company direct messaging that help it stand out from other competitors.

Video calls just recently rolled out to beta users, and the team has been hard at work on end-to-end encryption, integrations, and more as they work their way toward a more formal launch.