What are the most promising transformative tools for thought today?

I've mentioned these before and so at the risk of repeating myself:

1. Heptabase is interesting software.

2. Whiteboard feature of Diagrams.net is underrated.

3. Otter.AI is amazing voice to text transcription

4. SnagIt is useful to be able to easily screenshot almost anything

https://heptabase.com/ https://sketch.diagrams.net https://otter.ai/ https://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html

The tools you mention are generally interesting & good, but I'd classify them as their own frontier outposts. This is a biased view, but in my mind, what's needed is more bridges between computing-as-it-is and the rest of the world. Systems like Huginn and Node-RED offer some good capable takes here. It's still it's own frontier world, but I expect that "tracing"/observability systems eventually help open the door to wider-understanding of computing. Projects like Open Telemetry lead the fore in this world, in helping computing describe itself, explain itself.

VR is a medium that lends itself well to this.

For example a VR memory palace[0].

We're in the early days of haptics but gloves like the ones in this video[1] will allow for more dimensions of touch based tools.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=T9trIH_33qc

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=TajCGQJTrT8

I have been following Steve Ruiz development of tldraw on Twitter (very much worth a follow) and the community around it are developing all sorts of interesting other tools too.

https://mobile.twitter.com/steveruizok

https://www.tldraw.com

One particular one is this realtime collaborative canvas: https://sprout.place

Also know of: https://whimsical.com

Travel, same as always.