I Can See Everything Clearly Now! iGoogle, Tabs, Expose & Spaces

I am happier these days with my "electronic desktop" (so to speak) on my laptop. I still have a bad habit of switching between open screens using the minimize/expand feature, but tabs helped with that a couple of years ago somewhat. Last summer I really committed to blog, use delicious, and Google Reader. Since then I've added twitter, use callwave, have a myspace, facebook, wikispace, ning and much more. It is all fun at first and then life takes over and you can't keep up with it all. So I would access them a lot sometimes and at other times not at all. I think I am a binge or not at all type of person.

Where am I going with this. Well as technology evolves, it does get better. With iGoogle I now have everything that is possible to put on it there for easy access and viewing as well as many other fun things. My top gadgets give me access to my Delicious, Twitter, Google docs, calendar, reader and one that I am learning about Google Notebook. I also have my Callwave, Skype, Tiny url maker and favorite sunsets down lower on the screen along with the Leadership Quote of the Day. I now have really started staying up with these regularly for the most part.

This week I upgraded my laptop with the latest operating system: Leopard, MAC OSX.5.2. My 15 year old daughter has had it for sometime and acted like I was lower class since I could only do "expose" and not "spaces". I never used expose and quite hated it when for no valid reason my screen would suddenly show me all of my pages that were open when I accidently moved my mouse to some secret place on the screen. It drove me crazy at first, but I quickly learned to just click on the screen I wanted on top and then went on my way.

For some reason I think it bugged me - I hate not knowing about a technology the rest of my more technology-savvy family uses expertly, so I decided to try spaces. She and my husband were very condescending as I tried to set it up. They laughed at me when I didn't know what something meant, but I vowed to show them. They "snickeringly" said I should only set up two or three spaces and keep them all on one line, so I setup the max they recommended three. And I think I'm going to like it here - it sort of completes the items that I want to be able to see easily by adding spaces to tabs and iGoogle. Who knows maybe I will try expose - later.

What are your favorite gadgets? Which ones help you stay up with the world?