J . M A I L

Calibri

Calibri is a humanist sans-serif typeface family under the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection.

In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook.

Calibri was designed by Lucas de Groot for Microsoft to take advantage of Microsoft’s ClearType rendering technology.

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FROM WIKI : Calibri

Availability

The typeface is distributed with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2007, and Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.

This typeface, along with Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel, is also distributed with the free Powerpoint 2007 Viewer^[2] and the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.

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If you don’t have any of these products then have fun will arial or helvetica on this blog. Everyone else enjoy the clear type font :)

Rethinking My Desktop and Syncing My Online Persona

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?

New bottom bar on TwitCritics

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”.

What’s in a name? The usability of web names

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:

• try to make your name as short as possible, when people want to retweet your posts every character will count and 140 characters go quickly (why waste them with your user name?)
• use your real name in your twitter user name, people are already hard enough to find online

Don’t:

• use gimmicky names on twitter
• use numbers or underscores