I am playing around with my desktop to make it more sleek, less cluttered, and more usable.
The first thing I did was install fences to group my desktop icons together. I placed the four most important things together at the bottom of my desktop and everything else will be dumped into the thin column on the left hand side of my desktop. Fences is nice in that when I mouse over to the think column a scroll bar appears and lets me see more icons in the list.
I also have object dock set to only display item that are actually indicators rather than simply short cuts. In case you are wondering the recycling bin lets me know if I have stuff in the trash or not by changing its appearance.
Next I removed all the program launching short cuts from my taskbar. I left Word as windows 7 has the nice feature of right clicking on pinned items and bringing up a list of the most recently used. I didn’t want to loose this feature at the cost of uniformity. Also, since the time I took the picture of my desktop I have also added the firefox shortcut back to my taskbar just because I use it so often (one click is easier then a few keyboard strokes sometimes). All the icons on the right side of taskbar are indicators aswell.
Basically what I am thinking is that, everything on the desktop should be an indicator & button rather than simply just a button.
I am using launchy to launch everything almost all of my applications now. No more icons and clicking around to launch programs for me. I will updated later on if this is actually a smart move but it seemed like an interesting experiment to try.
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Finally, I have started moving over to the email jonhaber @ instead of jon.haber @. The period was never really needed and I realized it can be an issue for mobile devices. I now have “jonathanhaber” @ gmail, @ twitter @ facebook as well as my standard jonhaber @ gmail. I think going forward this will streamline things. It also makes me wonder if I should get the jonathanhaber domain as well. What do you guys and girls think?
This looks so cool. It would make tracking weight so easy. I think I would use it all the time if I had it.
Video of the Web Interface:
Video of the free Iphone App
and last but not least …
…. it posts to twitter.
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Price is $160. Thoughts?
From the TwitCritics Blog:
Slight tweak to our bottom bar. We are in the process of working on a lot of exciting big things but we are still paying attention to the little details that make your experiences on twitcritics as easy and understandable as possible.
Our careful and considered solution to the bottom bar design was to group items according to who we think will be using them.
General Users:
Home, About, Press, Contact
Developers / Power-users:
Blog, Widget
Business (is self explanatory)
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Here at TwitCritics we believe, “Little things can make a big difference”.
I learned today that on the web a name is not just a name.
Example 1: http://pixelposition.com/hyphens-underscores/
On twitcritics we were using underscores on our links to movies ie: http://twitcritics.com/movies/men_who_stare_at_goats
This is not the best practice. FTA:
Concensus of “repeat opinion” is that hyphens have an SEO value. Why? We know hyphens are seen as word separators. We don’t know, for sure, how Google, Yahoo! and Live Search interpret underscores.
Google’s does give their recommendation for URL structure in their Help pages.
Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.
Vanessa Fox wrote about best practices for image filenames on Jane and Robot. She discusses the issue in the following paragraph:
Make image filenames descriptive
If your filename includes multiple words, use hyphens to separate them (search engines tend to see a hyphen as a separator and an underscore as a joiner (so lavendar_plant would be seen as one word and lavender-plant would be seen as two).
The following is from April 2006 from Matt Cutts’ blog, Google’s chief engineer:
And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores…
I made a mistake when thinking about the design of our web links on twitcritics. I will learn from it and hopefully you can learn from my mistake before you do it too.
Example 2: Picking a twitter name
Users on twitter with number or underscores just get less followers. Don’t use them.
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Do:
Don’t:
I just watched the documentary “Objectified”. My brain is buzzing with hundreds of thoughts and comments. I want to get them all out but first I am going to re-watch this movie and write down my thoughts as I go. Expect to read a number of blog posts in the near future centered around design and interaction design. I highly recommend you watch (*download) this film. (btw the above video is just a short clip from the movie, the first guy who speaks is Dieter Rams, and you can see in just a few pictures how he influenced apple by following this link)
