Web Worker Daily

WWD Asks: What’s on YOUR Desktop? Posted: 20 Sep 2008 12:00 PM CDT 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? We’ll start by revealing the desktops of most of the WWD writing staff. We’ve also started a Flickr pool so you can share your images with everyone else as we’ve done. Believe it or not, I think I’ve learned a few things about my fellow WWD bloggers even just by seeing their computer wallpaper! Aliza Sherman: (click on screenshot above for larger image) Media advisory for Tweetup for WeVote08 I helped organize this week. Screenshot of Palbee, a site I reviewed this week. Personal monthly budget template. Haven’t used for a while but need should. Point & Shoot Video Program for my Flip camera. Remember The Milk icon. Have never actively used Remember The Milk. Spreadsheet of my company’s transactions. Details on a radio interview I’m doing this week. Final edit of a client’s enewsletter article. Installation file for ConceptDraw, a mindmapping program I’m evaluating. Flip videos for posting onto Flickr and my blog from the Tweetup event this week. Another screenshot of Palbee demo. Another screenshot of Palbee demo. July personal monthly budget. That was the last time I used the budget template. NDA from a friend. Miscellaneous expenses from my bookkeeper that I had to identify. Backup of my computer - my automatic Time Capsule life saver. Spanning Sync - to sync my iCal to my Google Calendar. A sample of the podcast called “A Woman at Work” that I’m going to be starting up. A friend’s book treatment that I sent to my book agent. My company’s digital check register. A draft communications strategy for a client. My Second Life sim SLURL. The time I was supposed to leave a meeting for another meeting. I kept forgetting what time I was supposed to leave so typed it really big on my computer desktop as a reminder. Judi Sohn: My dock on the right. I hate the new Leopard dock on the bottom. External USB drive which contains a nightly backup created with SuperDuper. Alias of Dropbox folder so I can keep important files in sync between desktop and laptop computers. I’m prepping for our nonprofit organization’s annual audit, so spreadsheets are various documents I’m preparing for our accountant. Bio slide about me for Dreamforce 2008 (I’m speaking on a panel). Another audit-related file. Copy for nonprofit’s e-newsletter that I laid out and will be distributed on Monday. Saved file of a NPR interview where a reporter called our organization “powerful.” We liked that. Printer proof of Fall newsletter. Copy of annual Box.net invoice. Really wish they would email me so I didn’t have to go hunting for it. More audit stuff. I just updated website with info on new print newsletter, including this PDF for download. Overview of our call center dashboard from Salesforce.com, which I needed to email to someone. Inventory assets from our accountant to check and update (audit). Illustration of colon and lymph nodes (from NCI) to use with a related blurb in e-newsletter (7). Mobile logo that I used in a WWD post. Two great kids. I love me utilities that have “Show in Menu Bar” option. Mike Gunderloy: Main HD in the computer Mirrored copy of the same HD Time machine backup to external drive Jungledisk backup to Amazon S3 I’ve got Finder set to show me hidden files - a necessity for dev. Unfortunately that means it shows me the hidden .DS_Store for the desktop. Processing folder for the ScanSnap scanner. Anything dropped here ends up in EagleFiler, thanks to Hazel. Anything dropped in these folders ends up on Flickr Same as #7 And anything dropped here goes to EagleFiler, where I organize most everything I try to run with desktop zero as well as inbox zero. Of course I do tend to have a few docs and apps open…but hey, with 12GB of RAM, I can afford it. Celine Rogue: This is what the desktop looks like on my laptop (an MSI Wind). The wallpaper is the ‘Serenity’ ship from Joss Whedon’s Firefly. To the left is a pop-out dock from RocketDock, which displays the programs and files I access daily. For everything else, I use Launchy (which I ’summon’ via the Windows key+spacebar). This means I never need to minimize windows just to access content on the desktop. On the dock: My Computer Control Panel PushPin Firefox Yahoo Messenger ToDoList Calculator Notepad VLC Media Player Paint.NET Mindjet MindManager 7.0 BitLord The Rosetta Stone My list of 101 Goals for 1001 Days Open Office Calc spreadsheet of my personal finances. Scott Blitstein: I’m testing Chrome and this is a shortcut to my To-do app using their application shortcuts feature. This is my default folder for incoming scanned items. This is my default folder for screenshots I capture using Jing An .iso for the Ultimate Boot CD.  An indispensable tech support tool. Projects - This is for “current” stuff once the need becomes a little less immediate. Art and files for a client project. Another client project. I do a lot of work in Drupal so routinely need access to modules, base themes and other supporting files.  This is for version 5.x Same as above but for Drupal 6.x. I’m donating my work on a site for my nephew’s Cub Scout Pack.  These are photos and theme designs An easily customized base theme for Drupal. I really want to test Sweetcron but haven’t done so yet.  It sits here to remind and taunt me. A css file I needed to download to make some quick adjustments.  Should be deleted. New logo files for my company.  I’m in the process of updating my literature and other marketing materials so easy access to them is great. Preparing to evaluate Zimplit CMS for a WWD review once I figure out where I want to host it.  It looks pretty nifty and can’t wait to take it for a spin. My Recycle Bin My desktop is generally used as a temporary holding area and it goes through various levels of cluttered-ness depending on what I am working on at the time. As part of my weekly review, I do try to clean it up and move things to more appropriate places. I use a program launcher so it’s typically usually just files stored there. What’s on YOUR desktop? Feel free to add your screen shot to our Flickr Pool, and tell us about it in the comments. Don’t forget to include a link to the image. Share/Send

OpenOffice Version 3, RC1 Adds Many Features Posted: 19 Sep 2008 06:00 PM CDT A version of the open source productivity suite OpenOffice.org version 3.0 is now out in a release candidate offering. While the most recent stable version is recommended for primary use at this point, and the release candidate is primarily for testing, some web workers who use this suite as a Microsoft alternative may want to try this pre-release version out. I’m starting to use it for testing purposes, and have appreciated the new document conversion features and suport. An open source suite should reach out to every document format, and do so easily. You can get the test suite for Windows, Linux, Solaris, or Mac OS X for free, and there are release notes avaiable here. Over on the OStatic blog, Kristin has a good post about what’s under the hood in the new version. As she notes, the most obvious changes are to the user interface, which is cleaner and makes things faster. There is also now a document conversion wizard, which will convert .docx files into OpenDocument formatting. The suite’s spreadsheet previously offered only 256 columns, but offers 1,024 in the new version. Names for spreadhseets can also now contain almost any character, while previously only letters, digits, underscores and spaces worked. There are also many additions to OpenOffice’s database. The suite has a new PDF Import Extension from Sun that allows for limited editing of PDF content. (Many OpenOffice users don’t use extensions, but there are many good ones, found here.) Check out OStatic’s early review of the Linux version (most of the new features apply to versions for all platforms), and if you’re unfamiliar with this suite, there are some good, free visual tutorials online, cited here. Share/Send

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