J . M A I L

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?