This week’s Wired Wednesday is in response to a request (oh yeah, we totally roll that way). The request was, and I quote: “do a productivity one. Like the desktop thing… little organizational things like that”.

I probably shouldn’t reward Captain Vague with doing what he asked for, but I’m a softie for requests. So here goes…

Gmail: It’s all about the colour-coding baby
I am an independent consultant. A business of one. I’m like that Street Cents segment where there’s a chick sitting at a desk in the middle of the road, and she has a sign that says “Me, Inc.”

Which is cool.

It also means that I receive and process a quantity of email that would make a person (i.e. me) weep.

Since I do not yet have a helper monkey, I have to find ways to keep back the tears.
(more inside…)

Sometimes you’re just in the mood for a meme.

From Webworker, some What’s on Your Desktop? for your Wednesday.

I used to be one of those people with icons covering my entire MacBook desktop, all glaring evidence of a failure to properly organize my files. These days, I try to take a desktop organizational moment every other week. Still, I’ve wondered what the things lingering on my desktop we all about. Why were they there? What might they tell someone else about me if they looked closely at them?

See the post, and their Flickr pool for examples.

As for me, my desktop consists of some image I’m loving, so long as it’s aligned left, and then files and folders I want close at hand.

Why only aligned left? Because I use image composition as a clutter detection system (and now we all know how my brain works). As I save files to my desktop, OS X adds them from right to left. Creating a creeping line of disordered “just for now” files moving slowly across the screen. If I’ve dumped enough files that they’re starting to obscure the image, it’s cleanup time.

Exhibit A:

Center align is just too much pressure.

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This is a two-fer post — Wired Wednesdays plus some Comics are for Everybody action.

Because…

Google has a browser.

It’s a Beta version, and it’s only available for Windows for now. But still -
Google has a browser.

At home I mostly use a Mac, so (besides my undying allegiance to Firefox) I can’t actually play with Chrome. Until Google releases a Mac version. Cough cough coughity cough Google. (Oh, and also a Linux one please, k thx).

But what I can do is read their launch materials, which are presented in… wait for it… comic book form! Not just a comic book, but a Creative Commons licensed comic book put together by Scott McCloud, of Understanding Comics fame.

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(Someday soon, Apple will teach us how to construct whole books out of one long amalgamated word.)

Sure, the word “etiquette” does bring to mind a world of doilies and curtsies. But that frilly frouffy word and what it represents can be the soft oreo centre between us crusty cookies.

We’re all squished up against each other on this tiny little interweb. And everybody’s got peeves (maybe the word “interweb” is one of them). What follows are some of mine. Or rather, not just a list of my peeves, but my peeves metamorphosed into a few of my personal rules for navigating this big bad abstracted world.

1. Remember the human
This phrasing is taken from elsewhere (though I forget where). And if I were going to rely on only one rule, this would be it.

The internet gives people anonymity, and people behave differently when they’re anonymous. You can’t even get anyone to come out to this lecture anymore, because we all think we know it off by heart.

And yet.

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From time to time here we discuss the less savoury videogames, and as an avid recreational casual sometime gamer, I think it’s important to also share some of the good stuff.

Like… PixelJunk Eden!

Or, as it is known in our house, “Jump jump!”

As in —
Husband gets home. Shoes still on, bag still packed.
Me: “Hi! Jump jump?”
Him: “Sure sweetie we can play Eden, just let me…”
Me: “Jump jump!”
Him: “Yeah, of course, I just want to…”
Me: “JUMP. JUMP.”

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Fresh off of watching Helvetica (and then watching it again — big thanks to Lex), I enjoyed this recent post at Logo Design Love (once again via Google Reader rec).

“It’s becoming more and more difficult to execute original logo designs. No matter how clever your idea, the chances are someone has created a very similar logo. Why is that? We’re all surrounded by the same influences, exposed to the same shapes, forms and patterns. With the importance of branding in the marketplace, and thousands of designers working on similar projects, it’s obvious ideas will, from time-to-time, look almost identical.”

You can see what they mean (I knew Columbia Sportswear reminded me of something):

Wayback Machine and Google Blogoscoped

Sun Microsystems and Columbia Sportswear

Many more logos and logo-a-likes here.

And now some bonus material. Including: a breast massaging robot, a face-stealing robot, and mad Mac speculationing.

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I’m a low-level typography geek. I love reading the “About this Typeface” description at the back of a book*, and a manuscript or website using the default font just isn’t finished yet.

“Typography is what language looks like.”

Cameron Adams gets meta on type with his recent post on the handwriting of type designers (via Slashdot, via Google Reader Rec). And I love a bit of meta me.

“Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we – people in the digital age – are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: newspapers, SMSes, instant messages, emails, web pages, signs, posters, billboards; the list of purposes is endless.

In these days where looping strokes have been replaced by keyboard clickety-clack, typographers define the style and tone of our missives. Would you like to be elegant, modern, childish or … disturbed? Then you can choose between Garamond, Montag, Comic Sans, Zebraflesh, and a thousand more.
…
The handwriting of typographers intrigues me because it raises so many questions, big and small: Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don’t? Does a typographer’s handwriting influence the typefaces they produce? Has the rise of digital communications made handwriting redundant? Do modern typographers, born of digital tools, lack the finesse of their more wizened counterparts? If so, does that change the way their type is designed?”

Personally, I’m a fan of Garamond. Palatino and Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold are elegant. And I think if you’re using Comic Sans in anything other than a comic, it’s a cry for help.
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This being the last Wednesday before the iPhone’s (insanely over-hyped) release in Canada I thought I’d cover the issues that surround the sleek little 3G hockey puck.

First things first - what exactly is 3G and why is it so important?
3G refers to third generation wireless capability. The little cellfriend you have now is probably (unless you bought it somewhere in Asia where 3G enabled phones are the standard) a 2G machine, which is why when you hear ‘internet-enabled’ what you really get is ‘darn slow transfer rates’. 3G phones change all that because as Wikipediastates:

“3G technologies enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephony, video calls, and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. Additional features also include HSPA data transmission capabilities able to deliver speeds up to 14.4Mbit/s on the downlink and 5.8Mbit/s on the uplink.”

Wicked cool right? 3G iPhone users will literally have no down time away from the internets. That is, not if they carry their phone with them everywhere they go (and don’t we all?)

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There’s a big fat post coming on open source and free software, but damned if I’m going to let the calendar get the better of me and miss a week.

And so…
Via BoingBoing: The Paper Version of The Web
A collection of the doodles that spawned some of the web’s more ubiquitous networking sites like Twitter and Flickr Places. That’s a small version of a Flickr Places sketch below (click to embiggen):

Via the PS3 store: The Linger In Shadows Teaser Trailer

Trippy “interactive art” coming soon to PS3s. And I quote “(t)he demo itself follows the ‘story-demo’ genre, revolving around a cat, a floating dog, a strange mechanical tentacled creature and a cloud of darkness”.

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