Engineers must be up to date with new ideas, technologies, tools, and more. Itโs part of our job and continuous learning.
Today, I write about Napkin AI (napkin.ai), an AI tool Iโve been using for the last 3 months.
โ ๏ธ Disclaimer: This post is not an advertisement and Iโm not getting paid by that company. Iโm just sharing my own experience with this free tool which might be worth knowing for all of you.
What is it about?
The motto of the company is:
Napkin turns your text into visuals so sharing your ideas is quick and effective.
Basically, you write a text and by clicking on the lightning icon โก๏ธ the AI will do its magic proposing a visual representation of the text. Actually, it proposes multiple visual representations for you to choose and, from each, you can tune it up with different transparencies, changing forms, and colors.
The AI tool not only copy/paste the text and sits it together with some visuals and icons but interprets (a bit) the meaning of the text to offer you a visual that could make sense.
Iโve used this tool to generate some visuals to illustrate ideas in my work and in this newsletter. You can find some of them on these posts ๐๐ป
My thoughts about the tool
Itโs good to represent workflows. The majority of the visual suggestions are about flows.
For representing an idea in a visual way, itโs not the best tool.
The tool is really good in the UX aspect because it makes it super intuitive and fast to have a decent visual representation.
At first, I was really impressed by the tool and how easy it was to create something nice.
After several uses, you realize that the tool proposes the same visuals many times (the lighthouse, the cone, and more) and you can find a few real differences.
In summary, this is a tool I still use for having visual representations of sequences, steps, and workflows. Another tool to have in our (already loaded) belts.
Did you use it as well? what are your thoughts about it?
Any similar tool you have? Feel free to reply to this email or write it in the comments, I would love to hear about more similar tools.
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Thanks. I'm going to look into this tool later today
I also use Napkin in some of my posts. I think itโs good at summarizing and highlighting ideas like all AI do. But after 2~3 times it starts to feel a little repetitive. I think itโs good in only specific patterns now. Might need to wait for more visual types (as I know itโs expanding now) to have more use cases!