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🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I dig up practical tools and digital hacks to help creators and small teams do more with less.

This week: screen recorders!

I’ve learned (the hard way) that screen recording always takes longer than I anticipate. Between setup, issues and the editing rabbit hole: cutting, zooming, highlighting, etc. It’s never as simple as hitting record.

I run into this constantly while recording for this newsletter and several YouTube projects.

So this week, I went searching for tools that could ease the pain 💊.

Also: a wild Substack fail that nuked a creator’s work. Plus, a creative way to use ChatGPT (or similar) to help you with visuals.

Screen Studio

For Mac fans (like myself), Screen Studio feels like a natural fit to create screen recordings easily. The interface is beautifully designed, and I love the background options; gradients, custom colors, etc, make everything look polished right out of the box.

It also saves me a ton of editing time with automatic zooms and highlights. The iPhone and iPad recording feature is a standout, mockups make the footage look great in seconds. But it's way more expensive than FocuSee (next tool), and of course only for Apple devices.

🔁 Alternative to: Loom, Camtasia and OBS Studio

Visit 👉 screen.studio​

💰 From $9 a month | No free plan

FocuSee

With FocusSee, screen recording is dead easy. It handles zooms, highlights, and clean cuts automatically, and yes, it records your camera too. So creating product demos, tutorials, or explainer videos is a breeze 📹✨

It’s not my top choice, but FocusSee is a solid alternative for two big reasons: it works on both Mac and Windows, and it's affordable. The UI could definitely be cleaner, and it doesn't have as many features as Screen Studio (previous tool), but their roadmap looks promising: like automatic silence removal and annotation support.

🔁 Alternative to: Screen Studio, Loom, Camtasia and OBS Studio

Visit 👉 focusee.imobie.com​

💰 From $69.99 (lifetime) | No free plan

Descript

I mostly use Descript to edit long-form videos; think interviews, demos, or talking-head content. It does have a screen recorder, but where it really shines is in speeding up the editing process.

I hate editing in Premiere (I suck at it) as it takes me forever. With Descript, I can clean things up in minutes by editing the AI-generated transcript like you'd edit a Word doc. It’s packed with AI tools for quick edits like removing filler words, shortening gaps, even refocusing your eyes to the camera. It feels like magic for non-editors.

🔁 Alternative to: Premiere, Loom, VEED.io and Camtasia

Visit 👉 descript.com​

💰 From $12 a month | Free plan available

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

Ever get tired of typing the same thing over and over? aText saves me hours by turning shortcuts like phone* into my full phone number or name* into my full name, it's perfect for forms, outreach, and repetitive tasks 📝.

It’s crazy affordable, works on MacOS and Windows, and even lets you format text with bold, underline and more. The UI isn’t winning design awards anytime soon, but who cares, it just works. Plus, you can back up all your snippets easily.

🔁 Alternative to: Apple Shortcuts and TextExpander

Visit 👉 trankynam.com/atext/​

💰 From $4.99/year (or $29.99 lifetime) | Free trial available

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

Bear with me, there’s a bit of science behind this one. But trust me, it’s worth it.

You’ll learn a handy trick to create on-brand banners for social media (or anything else) in seconds ⏱️.

I actually used this method to create my own YouTube banner (image below). The last time I needed one, it cost me a foot rub; my wife’s a graphic designer, and she’s probably not thrilled I’m sharing this shortcut around 😬.

I’ve always been hopeless with tools like Photoshop, even Canva feels overwhelming with all the options. So I turned to AI. But as we all know, generating images with AI can be messy and time-consuming, especially when you want to make small tweaks.

But coding? That’s where AI shines 🤖.

Instead of struggling with design tools, I just ask AI to create visuals using HTML and CSS, right inside Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. It’s quick, straightforward, and doesn't require any design skills. Plus if you know HTML basics, you can even tweak the text yourself in seconds.

Here’s how:

1. Open Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude.
2. Ask it to create a banner using HTML & CSS. Be specific: dimensions, style guide, ideas, past examples, etc.
3. Enable code generation (in Gemini, this is called “Canvas”).
4. Let it cook, perfect time for a quick coffee.
5. Tweak the design if needed.
6. Screenshot the result or convert the code to an image using CloudConvert (or similar).

And that’s it, you’ve got a clean, on-brand banner in less than 5 minutes, without opening a single design tool 🚀.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

We felt for Lucy Werner a few days ago, she deleted her podcast from Substack, only to see her entire publication vanish. It's a scary reminder of how fragile digital platforms can be, especially when your audience is everything.

Naturally, I went into panic mode and started looking for ways to back up all my newsletter lists, ideally on autopilot. I discovered it's not always as easy as it should be.

Cheers,

Josep

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