The other day I read a post on Lifehacker about revising emails, the main point of it was to revise the email more and more, the more people you send it to. They quoted David Silverman from Harvard:

1 to 5 recipients = 2 to 4 revisions
5 to 10 recipients = 8 to 12 revisions
Company-wide or to Executive Committee = 30 to 50 revisions

Do you think such revision is needed? Maybe I take the wrong approach, but in 95% of my emails I don’t really care in the sense that it’s not my problem if people don’t read my emails. I’m all for revising emails, but sending an email to 20 people and doing 20 revisions? Come on!

Generally speaking I would say you should revise your email once, to make sure you didn’t make any factual mistakes. If you’re sending to a wide audience, maybe you could revise once more to make sure everything is clear, but noone really cares about the odd spelling mistake, or anything like that. I mostly email my clients with project updates and such, they care about the project status, not the correct placement of commas. They are perfectly happy with a completely garbled email, as long as I do what I need to.

Obviously there are scenarios where careful wording and extreme revision is needed (job offers, investment opportunities, etc), but I think in the day to day email business there is no need to be so meticulous. Yes, you will make some mistakes, but you won’t spend all day revising your simple email.

Oh yes, I do love icons, and I found a great list of 15 free icon sets for your iphone on Make Use Of today. The title might be a bit misleading, you can use these icons anywhere, they just look like the icons that the iphone uses.

While many of these icon sets look similar they are all beautiful and each one is subtly different. I especially like Chalkwork which is a great take on the standard iphone like icon design, and Aquaticus Social which I have known for quite some time now, and have used on many sites.

If this isn’t enough, I also use two great icon search engines, Iconlook and Iconfinder to find icons, if you need a specific one, your best bet is searching these sites, or doing a Google search. I also showed you some beautiful and free icons from Jordan Michael before, take a look!

PDF viewing has been with us in Gmail for a while now, and since many times I just need a quick info or two from a pdf, it became quite comfortable being able to open it right in my browser from Gmail. The Official Gmail Blog just announced that they have added tiff and ppt support as well!

I don’t really use tiff a lot, but scanned files are often saved in tiff, which can be a multi-page document that some software has problems with. I didn’t try this myself, but apparently Gmail will have no problem with these documents, they will open in the same way as they were intended to, multi-page images.

The ability to view presentations on the fly, in the same viewer, is also great, no need to download and open with office, or go to a separate viewer, it will open right there in your browser. Again, on my end I usually do not need to actually have these saved, I use ppt-s for data flow information and so on, no need to have them constantly on my hard drive.

It’s always surprising to see the amount of awesome free software out there, but often it isn’t that easy to find the tool you need. For each need, there is usually a well known commercial software though, like Photoshop, Outlook, OneNote, their free counterparts however are not always such “icons”.

Osalt is a site which suggests a lot of open source alternatives to widely known software, or the other way around, showing you the commercial borther of free software. With 11 categories, a searchable database, multiple suggestions and system config notes, the data you can find is very useful.

You can also find a short description for each app, links to the homepage, rss options, tags and so on, so you’ll find what you need in a jiffy. I like this site a lot because it doesn’t just point me to one open source item, but many, allowing me to choose from a wider range. I would love to see some commenting options on there, although a star rating is available. Some filtered comments would make it easier to choose without downloading, but I’m not complaining, a great service regardless.

A facelift was very much needed for the blog for a while now, there were so many missing features I wanted to add. The first thing I changed is the typography which was way too small, reading Hack Your Day should now produce occular pleasure in the extreme. I also added search functionality and a few pages at the top.

You can now also follow the blog on Twitter, or you can click the super friendly and inviting RSS link at the top to follow via RSS. If you have anything to say, any comments, suggestions, post ideas, please let me know in the comments, or you can drop me a line any time at daniel [@atsign@] hackyourday [dot.] com.

A typical day on YouTube. You find a cool music video, say a Dave Matthews one and you love the song. You then scroll down, the first comment states that Dave Matthews is a fraud because Puccini writes better violin pieces, and then you see 20 comments about the current political situation. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t really go to YouTube for political debates.

If you’re not interested in some comments, YouTube has implemented a new filter system that lets you hide them altogether, or filter them so only comments with a rating of 1 or better are shown for example. You can also hide profanity and racial stuff, so you might just get some relevant comments if you’re lucky.

Personally I go for vids, not comments, so I don’t really mind, but if there would be any interesting comments it would be great to see them. It’s great that they’re trying to raise the user experience bar though, I hope they think up some even better mechanics, allowing video posters to close comments to profanity, they just wouldn’t show up at all.