The 'Magnifying glass' mystery

An icon with a magnifying glass image is usually mapped to a 'zoom' function...that's what I thought till someone pointed out that in MS Word, Excel (which are very other commonly used applications), the print preview icon has a magnifying glass superimposed on a blank page. Now, how is that supposed to convey that the action on clicking the button will be a 'print preview'? !!

How is it that we are used to clicking on this icon for viewing a print preview without confusing it with a zoom option?

Any thoughts?

How-to: Listen to what your users are saying

...Even if they aren't talking to you.

This morning, I get a tweet (a Twitter message) from someone complaining about her Firefox 2 frequent crashes.

I've experienced Firefox 2 crash at random on Vista, and I wasn't the only one. (Aside: I'm happily settled on Firefox 3 now.) My response to her tweet.



When I checked my tweets a couple of hours later, I had a reply from @firefox_answers


I don't follow @firefox_answers, nor do they follow me. I didn't even know they existed.

But they are listening.

How do they do it? The easy part is getting to the tweets. Look at Twitter Search or one of hundreds of twitter monitors for keywords. Lots of companies use twitter to promote and gauge community perception.

The tough part is listening and responding. I am amazed at the attention that Mozilla pays to its customers. I have been a fan of Firefox for its product, now I tip my hat to their customer service. Try it for yourself. Pose a question or issue on firefox on twitter - I'm sure @firefox_answers is listening.

Invert Selection

Would that not be a good feature to have? I have been in this situation umpteen number of times where I have chosen to see some specific rows in Microsoft Excel; once done reviewing the data, I would want to see only the rest of the rows, this would have been possible by providing a “Invert Selection” option along with the (Select All) that is provided by default.

Wonder why this is not the case. I have seen the invert selection is very few applications I have used, one that comes to mind is Picasa (oh maybe only Google does provide it?).

Thoughts?