David Owens

After taking the PSATs last year I naïvely gave the College Board my main email address to send “college information” to. I soon found out, much to my chagrin, that that meant inundating me with at least 10-15 emails a day from various colleges. Tip: Don’t be stupid like me and give your main email address out to services such as this.

It’s not necessarily the fact that all these colleges are emailing me that’s the problem. It’s the way they go about it. I’d be pretty content at going through an inbox filled with emails from colleges if they:

• Contained information about the college
• Told me why I would want to go to their college above other colleges
• Had a short list of majors, with a link to see a full list
• Were nicely written
• Had a link to the college’s website

But unfortunately almost all of the emails I’ve received thus far haven’t had any of these things. You’d think it would be common sense. Instead, I wade through a stack of emails telling me to “Sign Up” for this and “Click here” to get more information sent to me!

And a link to the actual college website is nowhere to be seen; instead, all links lead to a sign-up page offering no information whatsoever. Yeah, because I’m going to sign up to get more email or snail mail when I could just look on your website. Which I now have to google or guess because you haven’t listed it anywhere in your email.

So I’ve resorted to filtering all of it into a label and only looking at it to basically go through and delete most of them (they’re all pretty much carbon copies of one another, I wonder if they all use the same annoying marketing firm). And some of them still manage to slip through the filter and not mention ‘college’, ‘university’, or even ‘school’.

The sad part is I want to learn more about different colleges and having good, informational emails sent to me would be a benefit. These colleges have meticulously maintained campuses and pretty nice websites, for the most part. Why can’t they give attention to the emails they send out in the same fashion?

I’ve been using Chrome for Mac on and off since before the official beta for Mac was released and it has slowly taken over as my default browser for several reasons.

1. Speed - Chrome has been hands-down faster for me than Safari. App launch and page loading times are noticeably quicker than in Safari.
2. Homepage/New Tab Page - I’ve found this to be a great launch page. It’s quick loading time and minimal look make it top Safari’s Top Sites for me. It also includes recently closed tabs (handy when you accidentally close a tab but it’s awhile back in your history).
3. All-in-one “Omnibox” address and search bar - The built-in search (along with the ability to type a TLD such as “wikipedia.org”, hit the tab key, and search that site) is simple and quick.

The combination of these things make Chrome irresistible. Even if it’s still a beta and a little rough around the edges, it’s still replaced Safari as my everyday browser. Extension support will be icing on the cake once it’s available on the Mac.

That being said, I’d like to see inline PDF viewing and automatic file opening for .zip and automatic mounting for .dmg files, two things Safari has that are marvelous.