A few months ago, Google announced that Google Reader was being shut down on July 1st, 2013. As a regular user of Google Reader, I will miss the simple design for the RSS reader. (Speaking of RSS, here is the RSS feed for this blog!) I am undecided if I want to move towards feedly or a similar service. But I have been using Pulse on my smartphone which I recommend to anyone. Google Reader is only one aspect of the product "cleaning" the company has been doing over the past year or so (including the well-anticipated but was not used, Google Wave).
Google is also retiring iGoogle in November of this year. Now I don't know what to put as my homepage! It's been my homepage for over seven years; that duration is more than 25% of my life's existence. I will happily take suggestions/recommendations for a replacement homepage!
This week, Google continued the streak of eliminating things I used often by removing Tilde Search. For those who missed out on this amazing search feature which allowed searching for synonyms, I am sorry for you; for those who did use it, I am with you in this time of hardship. The result of this: 1. Worse search results 2. The ` and ~ (Tilde/Grave Accent) key will become the second to last used key on my keyboard.
The least used key on my keyboard must be the function (fn) key; I just don't encounter a time where I ever have to use the "Function buttons F1-12". Good thing they have different uses! Did you know that the letter "e" is the most used letter in the English language? Not surprisingly, I'm not having terrible with the "e" key but the "i" key; it really says something about my personality. As I look at my keyboard more closely and analyzing my typing style, the "shift" and "Enter" on the bottom right don't get pressed on very often; I perpetually the left "shift" when I need to capitalize and the "enter/return" key to commit the next line or submit. For Mac users, F11 and F12 without the fn button are extremely useful (Show Desktop and Show Dashboard, respectively)!
And I prefer the keys being right next to each other which for some reason, laptop companies are going away from; I don't need empty space between my keys! That is one dirty old laptop...