By Using LaunchBar and Dock Doger, I’ve been able to remove Adium, Skype and Address Book from my Dock without slowing me down, in fact, it speeds me up! My MenuBar now has: Skype, Adium, Little Snitch 2, Shimo (VPN Tunnel), Plaxo, iStat CPU monitor, iStat Network Monitor, Default Airport Monitor, Default Battery Monitor, iStat World Time, and Input Method Selection window (Romanji, Hiragana, IMK-QIM)

Make Adium function well as a background only application by assigning a “Global Shortcut” via the input box at the bottom of the Preferences/General tab. I recommend: ⌘⎋ (cmd+esc), the shortcut used by Proteus. This feature was added in Adium 1.2.

Also on the Preferences/General tab, select “Show Adium status in menu bar” so that you’ll know if Adium is running and if it has a background notification.

Note that once you put Adium into background mode, you’ll no longer be able to access many items of the “View” menu, so you’ll want to memorize the shortcut keys for:

⇧⌘H: Show All Contacts (SHIFT+CMD+H)
⌃⌘I: Hide User Icons (CTRL+CMD+I)
⌃⌘S: Hide Status Messages (CTRL+CMD+S)

Unfortunately, there is no shortcut for “Hide Groups” so you’ll need to use “Dock Dodger” to enable the Dock (and Menu Bar) each time you want to Enable and Disable the Groups in your contacts view…

Other shortcuts include:
⌘/: Show/Hide the Contacts List
⇧⌘L: Transcript Log Window
⌥⌘L: File Transfers Window
⇧⌘H: Hide Offline Contacts

⌘I: Get Info on Contact
⌘L: Open Log Viewer on Contact   

⌘Y: Set your Away Message
⇧⌘Y: Set your Available Message

The entire “View” menu includes:

Last, here is the Preferences/General Tab where you should both: a) Set the Global Shortcut Key and b) Show Adium Status in the Menu Bar.

Last weekend my friend Will came for a visit, and recommended some great little Mac stuff while geeking out for a bit. Now the following tools are in use:

• Sequel Pro：The “Sequel” to Cocoa MySQL
• Launch Bar: Beta 5 Released
• iStat Menus: System Monitoring and World Clock in Menu Bar
• Adium FaceBook Connector: Connect with FaceBook friends in Adium

These have replace my use of:

• Mac OS X Menu Bar System Clock
• World Clock Deluxe
• Spotlight

And on the LaunchBar front, much has changed since the “old days”. Here are a few very useful tips to get you started.

Also, take a look at LaunchBar’s “Text Clips” feature.

On the other hand, there are two unified instant messaging clients that I’ve found to be very stable, very convenient, and have great i18n support:

* Adium for Mac OS X
* IM+ for the Blackberry

Really highly recommend both of these!

Why does my iPhone have one icon for SMS’s and one for Email?

There are some interesting Wikipedia pages about Unified Messaging and Unified Communications, including:

Unified communications (UC) is “an industry term used to describe all forms of call and multimedia/cross-media message-management functions controlled by an individual user for both business and social purposes” [1]. This potentially includes the integration of fixed and mobile voice, e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advanced business applications, Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, voice-mail, fax, audio video and web conferencing, unified messaging, unified voicemail, and whiteboarding into a single environment offering the user a more complete but simpler and more effective experience.

Maybe an iPhone and a Mac Book Air already qualifies as a “Unified Messaging System”. Fax’s are obviously easily directed to your email Inbox, but there is still something missing.

Sadly, it seems that Google is probably the best positioned entity on the planet to provide “Unified Messaging”. Just plug Google Mail into the gaim/libpurple multiple instant message interface instead of gtalk, and then somehow force the Skype guys to jump on the bandwagon and you’re done with the desktop/web side. Just need to figure out a way to handle SMS and voice.

Maybe the next “Hotmail” is in here somewhere… That simple idea that’s sitting right under our nose. That way that will we can ever so slightly change the way people use computers, that could potentially be worth something.

• Twitteriffic：”super lightweight” Mac OS X desktop Twitter Client
• SMS/Text Message: just text in any language to: +44 7624 801423
• Twinkle: iPhone geo-localized twitter client – who’s twittering near you.
• Web (Twitter.com): Of course, you can post directly via the website
• 也能通过IM留言，但是没有支持QQ或MSN。现在只有：GTalk，LiveJournal，和 Jabber

试试看！

The basic idea is to first use your screen resolution to calculate a custom “Paper Size”. For example, if you’re on a MacBook Air you’re resolution would be 1280 x 800, and at 72dpi, that would be 17.77 x 11.11 inches, or 45.15 x 28.22 centimeters.

You can add a shape to the background to set a custom size… Just don’t set Mac OS X to swap your wallpaper every 5 seconds or the system will crawl to a halt – at least if you’re working with PDF files…

I like a lot of things about the Firefox browser, but wish it blended better with the rest of the Mac OS X operating system. Adium fits into OS X perhaps better even that iChat, but the Firefox icon looks downright fugly compared to Safari… Well, a designer named Adam Betts put together an more aquafied alternative of John Hicks original. Download the new Icons or check out Adam Betts’ original post.

To further enhance the look of your Firefox, try the Mac OS X themes available at TakeBackTheWeb. GrApple (UNO) helps FF fit in.

终于查到了怎么解决这个问题。。。

1。启动的时候按“SHIFT”（等很长的时间～会启动超级慢）
2。别登陆！
3。按那个往左的箭号（back arrow）
4。按那个“重新启动”
5。等很长的时间～电脑会再来跑更新的程序
6。等等等～电脑会自动的重新启动～都会好了

原来的英文解释在AppleInsider.com的这里。

Pictures => 照片 Movies => 影片 Downloads => 下载 Etc… 等等…

If you also use software like VMware, or sometimes use the Terminal to manipulate these files, you can find it annoying that UTF-8 is still not supported everywhere…

You can duplicate the default system functionality of using english language (or roman character anyway) file names for your actual files, but then localize them so they aren’t so annoying to look at. For example, to make my Finance folder into my 财务 folder, I renamed the english version to “Finance.localized”, then created a .localized subfolder inside (mind the leading dot!) and then created a zn_CN.strings folder inside there. zh_CN.strings simply contains:

“Finance” = “财务”;

Restart your finder (killall Finder) or log out and log back in to see the changes. Enjoy your slightly more chinafied mac…

More information about the procedure is on the Mac Developer Connection website: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPFileSystem/Articles/DisplayNames.html

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If you’re already an Ecto user, hurry up and grab this one. It’s alpha, but it’s at least as ready for prime time as the shakey applescript based mess that is Ecto 2…. I wonder what my upgrade fee will be?

Note that if you use Chinese in your terminal, you’ll want to make sure that you’re configured for UTF-8. Use the settings on this page to enable full UTF-8 input and output.

Well, this time around the error is less obvious, and easier to work around…

SSL services are generally “wrapped around” a protocol, which causes the protocol to require a separate port to operate. HTTPS and IMAPS are good examples of this. On the other hand, TLS protocols generally are a feature of a protocol, and can be activated in the middle of a session. SMTP is a good example of this.

In spite of their similarities, TLS and SSL are not necessarily compatible, though TLS can transform itself into SSLv3 in certain circumstances…

LDAP implementations would generally provide LDAP on port 389 and SSL LDAP (ldaps) on port 636. However, Apple AddressBook doesn’t actually do SSL, it does TLS, which is interwoven into the LDAP protocol and can happens port 389.

So, to securely use your LDAP server, you should select the “SSL” checkbox, but then override the port to 389.