Gmail Labs : it sucks being a minority

The latest announcement at Gmail blog covers some of the experimental features (Gmail Labs) that will graduate the Labs, or, in other words, will become a part of the Gmail service, and some features that will retire, or, in other words, will be completely removed.  While usually changes like this don’t affect myself much, this time I am in the minority.  That is, I am using one of those features that will be retired – Fixed Width Font.

Fixed width font

A lot of my emails have to do with coding and from automated scripts that send me the output.  These make much more sense when displayed with fixed width font.  Vertical alignment, tabulation levels, and simple table-like structures – these all break horribly when viewed with variable width font.  Too bad that’s how I’ll have to look at it now.

Variable width font

Tags in system applications

I was thinking about how cool tags are. They truly help finding bookmarked or themed information faster. Keeping up with important issues is much easier too.

But are there any good uses for tags in system applications? Sure, there are. One particular area that springs to mind is font management.

After I have installed about 6,000 fonts on my computer I realized that it is extremely difficult for me to efficiently use them. There are no categories or bookmarks of any kind. There are not subfolders. There are no comments or descriptions. I would be willing to sort out and tag all these fonts once to be able to find the most appropriate font later.

KDE people? Anyone?