Get Your Tech Affairs in Order for 2012

Mail thinks this is junk. Mail is right.

Welcome to 2012. The day that experts’ columns appear  with abandon, advising us on New Year preparations and goals. Generally the best recourse is to read these columns, save them in a location where you’ll never find them, and then procrastinate until it’s too late to act on the advice. For the procrastinators among us, here are some timely tech things to do to start 2012 off with a clean slate (or a clean iPad). Most are guaranteed hangover cures—since you’d probably rather have a hangover than do any of these tasks:

1. Take the trouble to actually “unsubscribe” to every junk email you’ve marked as spam and allowed to accumulate by the thousands in your Mail  junk folder.

2. Update every person in your Address Book with current phone numbers, emails and addresses, and delete the duplicates.

3. Go to every website where you’ve entered a password that you’ve forgotten, and change them all to passwords you can actually remember.

4. Delete all of the duplicate songs in your iTunes library, delete all of the stupid playlists you  made when you were younger, and create new playlists for your current favorite songs.

5. Load every CD you’ve never copied into your iTunes library into your computer to copy over the songs. Then put the CDs on some dusty shelf somewhere.

6. Visit the websites of all of your credit cards, loans and cell phone carriers to examine their privacy policies and opt out, since you’ve already been automatically opted in.

7. Organize all of the apps on your iPhone into meaningful folders and delete all the free apps you downloaded while drinking with friends.

8. Ditto all of the apps on your iPad.

9. Investigate the latest software for erasing your online identity in the (unfortunate) event of your untimely death. Then pick your software poison for making all of your stupid Facebook entries (yes, they were stupid) and your self-aggrandizing tweets (yes, be honest, you were trying to make yourself look good to total strangers) leave the universe with you.

10. Or just clip this list to a safe but obscure location where you’ll never find it again, and pour yourself another Bloody Mary.

Design Is for Function. Looks? A Bonus.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

—Steve Jobs, US computer engineer
& industrialist, Apple (1955 – )

Flipboard, meet Steve Jobs. Actually, you already have! You’ve created a product for Steve’s iPad that follows his philosophy that good design is about good functionality (“how it works”), and you’ve given us good looks and good feel as a bonus.

Flippin' out over Flipboard!

And what a bonus it is! Just the act of “flipping” a page makes Flipboard inviting. You’ve got us flipping virtually. We’re flipped out over the way Flipboard makes sense of our virtual worlds and brings them all together in one gloriously designed app, where function overtakes form, and both are champions.

Now we’re connected in one virtual fell swoop to Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instagram, Flickr, LinkedIn and more than we can ever save to Read It Later, plus more professional online content than we can contemplate on Instapaper. We can thrill to feeds on Art, Design, Tech, Lifestyle, Oprah and over 30 industry professions, and it will seem just like a lark with a magazine to us.

You’ve made our work seem like fun, Flipboard 1.5. And you’ve done Steve proud.

Sources
Flipboard 1.5 from the Official Flipboard Blog
Design quote adapted from InspireUX.com