Something that has been severely lacking in the official Twitter desktop app has been “multi-window” or multiple view ability. I recently moved from the official app (which I loved because it utilizes stream) to Twitteriffic because it was much easier to follow lists and saved searches.
Open in New Window
The newest update to the Twitter desktop app has completely changed that. Although it is not perfect, you can now take any view and “Open in New Window”. This pops it out of the app into its own fully resizable and movable box. It’s not yet to the point of Nambu’s multi view updating and unread counts but it is a step in the right direction.
I am now totally back on board with the official Twitter app again. Thanks for paying attention guys!
My brother is two years younger than me and I remember him getting College junk in the mail for his last two years of high school. I probably got all that same junk too, I just tossed it out since I already knew where I wanted to go.
Postcards, booklets, letters and CD’s. The paper products I expect but the CD’s really brought me back to the days when AOL would send 10,000 free hours every month. Brightly colored, sometimes reflective and always had a unique way to open them.
As colleges find more and more creative ways to get information to students and entice them to pay big bucks for a four year piece of paper do they really think a CD is going to accomplish this?
My issues with CD’s are:
Offline – Having the content offline, disconnected from the rest of the updated world is a huge draw back, information gets out of date quick, that 3 day postage plus 1-2 weeks before the student decides to look at it 2-3 programs could have been added/dropped. Students are use to their connected world and why would they want to leave it?
Takes Effort – It takes time and effort to unwrap and put in a CD and load up the content on it. What is the benefit to the student?
Waste – Producing the CD could take weeks or even months of resources from an already stretched staff. CD’s cost money to produce, not to mention all the trash it creates in the process.
An Alternative?
Respect the prospective student and the environment. Let your current students sell the school and use your programs and graduates as pillars to success. Crowd source their stories and thoughts about the school.
Sending content to students should done online if possible. Cost is almost nothing to produce and no shipping cost, only time is needed. Most of the content is usually found on essential sites anyways, admissions, transfer credit, registrar.
My prediction is that personalized online content is the way to go, find out as much about the student as possible, give them a personalized URL and tailor all the content to that student. Make them feel special, show them you care and they will be intrigued.
They will reward you ten fold. Either by coming to your great university or by telling you off. Telling you off being the most important, that is the only way you can get feedback, refine your approach and get more students.
As a university web worker we constantly are typing in the same pattern of URL for every site. This becomes time consuming and routinely gets misspelled forcing a rapid delete key actions. I also wondered in the back of my mind about a shortcut to typing in URL’s much like IM word shortcuts but never looked too far into it.
Yesterday thanks to a Lifehacker article I realized the URL shortcuts were built into firefox all along! I generally use de.icio.us or ma.gnolia for my bookmarks so frankly I have never opened the firefox bookmark manager. Maybe back in firefox 0.2 but it has ben a while.
Creating shortcuts are easy with Firefox keywords, first create a new bookmark.
Name can be anything.
Location is the base URL for your commonly typed site but instead of having a static URL we are going to replace the changeable part with %s. So, http://admissions.wayne.edu/ becomes http://%s.wayne.edu/.
Keyword is what will distinguish this link from the others, you want to keep it short but still memorable, we will use it in the next step.
Then simply go to the Address Bar and type in “w admissions”
Hit the Enter Key or Go button and…
Magic! You just saved yourself ~3 seconds. Over time though in a day you might save 2 minutes which adds up to about 14 minutes per week and and 728 minutes per year, or 12 hours!
That is a day and a half of work, for any web worker this feature is almost a requirement. For some reason it has fallen through the cracks for me and a few of my colleagues. I hope it helps you.
The Apple products and community never cease to amaze me. When there is a problem to solve more than likely someone has already created an elegant solution. An experience I had today reinforced my findings ten fold.
I have a few shares on a network drive that I connect from OS X via Samba. Files get populated into those folders by other applications and when they are ready I goto the directory and pick them up. Well Finder has a mysterious refresh rate for directories… I have never been able to figure it out and there is to my knowledge no hotkey to manually refresh.
So I goto good ol’ Google to find a solution… Looks like nothing built in, but there is this nifty utility called Refresh Finder. Built on AppleScript it is lightweight and does what it needs and gets out of the way.
I hate to say it but it far surpasses any elegant solutions I have seen for Windows. Usually those include some constantly running application in the background, starting at startup, always looking for an update, and probably costing $19.99 nagware.
Downloaded and installed in 2 minutes. This will save a lot of time, usually I end up having to just randomly click on folders to hit something that is not cached so Finder can do a refresh. Now there is a refresh button similar to on Safari in the Finder toolbar and life is quite a bit less stressful.
A definite download for any Mac user. If I were to rate it a 10 out of 10 would be in order. Great work S�derhavet.
