UsingMac.com

Get the Most out of Adium

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.

Most of Mac users have known the existence of this instant messaging client. And today, I would like to reveal some of the nifty tricks while using Adium to get the most out of Adium, such as inserting line break, changing nickname, updating Twitter with Adium, and many others.

Don't forget to leave your comment or feedback.

Mail Keyboard Shortcuts

Without any doubt, Mail is the most welcomed Email Client. It's also the most essential Mac application. In my daily Mac usage, Mail has never been absent from my workflow.

There are lots of features provided by Mail which will take us dozens of hours to read through all of them. I, as a lazy reader myself, would gladly suggest some of these keyboard shortcuts to help you utilize most of Mail features.

Before proceeding to the list of keyboard shortcuts, these are several previous articles for your reference to get the most out of your Mail:

Continue reading and you will see a list of more than 60 Mail shortcuts!

Ten Useful Mail Plugins

Mail has long become our daily visit, essential application; Whether it's for opening incoming messages or reading fresh RSS Feeds. Many have used Mail plugins to optimize their performance, how about you?

Here are some of the Mail tips and tricks that you may want to know.

You can expect to see several great plugins upon reading this article. Feel like to continue reading?

10 Nifty Mail Tricks that You Definitely Want to Know

As a solid procrastinator myself (and a mysterious Mac fanboy), I tend to stare all day long at my Mailbox and Subscribed Feeds. Even though you are less similar to me, under the depth of my heart, I still believe that you will frequently check your Mailbox. This motivates me in bringing up these cool, less-known tricks in using your Mail that will definitely benefit you, not to make you procrastinate further but to make your spare time more enjoyable.

These tricks include message redirection, message rejection, slideshow of attachments and other nifty Mail tricks. You will definitely want to know more about these as I was in the first place.

Reasons to Love Adium

Adium is a Mac instant messanging application. You can grab this application here. Not only for me, these several reasons will also make you fall in love with Adium.

1. Connecting People

In real world, these words most suit Nokie. But in virtual world, I think these words make more sense to be gifted to Adium. Using Adium, you can connect to almost every instant messaging users.

2. Half the Price Free!

I love free stuffs and I am sure that you will love them too; Free downloadable Adium won't be an exceptional for me and for you.

Change Mail Alert Sound

Two days before, I just discussed about how you can Change Flag Icon of Mail. I know if you've chance, you will try that.

And now, I'm going to introduce you how to change your Mail alert sound. If you notice, your Mail has four types of alert sound, i.e. Mail Fetch Error, Mail Sent, New Mail and No Mail. The function of these types of alert sound are self-explanatory so I am sure I don't need to explain further.

These alert sounds are stored in your Mail application package with the format AIFF. Before going further, I will give you a brief explanation of this audio format.

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format)

According to wikipedia, AIFF is..

Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was co-developed by Apple Computer in 1988 [1] based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format (IFF, widely used on Amiga systems) and is most commonly used on Apple Macintosh computer systems. AIFF is also used by Silicon Graphics Incorporated.

This audio format is non-compressed, lossless format which uses much more disk space than MP3 but helps you in streaming in multiple audio files from disk to your application. Hm.. A bit difficult to understand it, maybe this can help you, "It's fast yet expensive audio format."

You can go to Simply the Best to get the various sound effects in AIFF format.

And next, you're going to be directed to the location of these sound files.

Mail Tips: Marking Messages

In order to easily distinguish between useful Mail and useless Mail from your cluster of messages inside Mail, you can use four types of message marking as your assistance. These four types of marking available in Mail are: Mark As Unread, Mark As Flagged, Mark As Junk Mail and Mark As Hidden.

How to use these four message markings for your Mail?

Set Custom Incoming Mail Sound

Everytime you have incoming message to your Mail, you will realize that there is a sound echoed by your Mail. This sound is set as New Mail Sound by your Mail default. The fun thing here is you can set this incoming Mail sound with custom sound.

Do you want to this setting custom Mail sound can be done?

Mailbox Archives

Maybe some of you haven't tried to archive your mailbox messages and still left them there inside your Mail inbox. I cannot say that it's not good, but I can say that archiving your mailbox can save you mail space because it'll help you remove the attachment by saving only the plain text and also can help you organize better your incoming mail.

Apple Mail - Setting Gmail Account

I found this tutorial from Google really useful when you want to create new Gmail account for your Apple Mail application.

Step 1. Mail ▸ Preferences...

Adium - Change Default Font

Sometimes you want to change the look of your font, your font-style or even your font-color when you chat with your friends. You can set this easily inside your Font Settings Pane.

Show Fonts

If you click on Adium Menu Bar ▸ Show Fonts, your Font Setting Pane will pop-up right in front of your eyes, floating over all other opened windows. You can also open Font Setting Pane using keystrokes Command-T.

Set Custom Status Message with Adium

By default, Adium only provides five status message for you, i.e. Available, iTunes, Away, Invisible, and Offline. If you want, you can easily create new status message which will inhabit your Adium status message selection for eternal.

Here is how to set your new status message :

Leopard Mail Tricks : Using Notes

I remember the last time I used my Mac OS X Tiger, I used Journler to take some notes.

Since the upgrade to Leopard, I started falling in love with mail and its new features : Notes and To Do. However, this time I'll share you my way to use Notes efficiently.

Before step further, I recommend you to download additional plugin for Mail. It's called Letterbox which I've discussed a little in my past article Get Various Leopard Enhancements for Free.

Shortcuts play the most important parts in increasing productivity. Therefore, in the middle this discussion, I'll include many useful shortcuts.

Leopard - Mail Tricks

I've found out several tricks with Mail that can help you with your workflow.

Trick 1. Selecting Items

Adding/Substracting Selection

Command key will give you the effect of toggling; It means that you can change the select/deselect status of certain items.

When keystrokes Command-A is pressed, all items will be highlighted. It's powerful, isn't it? And one more thing, with this keystrokes, all highlighted items won't be marked as Read, they will stay in their current condition. It's all about using Command key.

Cool iChat Tips that You've Forgotten

In Leopard, iChat has come with greater user experience and perhaps user-friendly. This makes some forgot the old small yet useful tips. Today, we will try our best to refresh your iChat's skill.

Playing Around with Buddy's Info

To open iChat Buddy's Info, click on the name of your buddy on Buddy List and then hit keystrokes Command-I. There are several tips you can do the following :

Check Buddy's Capabilities

There it is, under Profile and below your buddy's display photo, you can see your buddy's chat types that are available.

Adium New Features

Should I, as a former Windows user that only have MSN messenger and YM! accounts, change to Adium instead of using iChat that cannot support both of them for free?

MeBeam Integration

Thanks to anlumno for submitting this MeBeam Integration to Adium Xtras. And here is the good news, with MeBeam Integration we can now initiate video chat with our friends on Adium. This fact strengthen my desire to switch to Adium.

Note : This is just a temporary solution for Adium Video Chat. I am currently waiting for Adium itself to provide video chat.

Adium - Change Your Display Image

Inside Adium, you can change your display and can be see by other people. The advantage here is, you can easily change it.

The Display Image

To change your display image, you can do the following:

Adium - Ultimate Dock Icon

Feelin’ bored with duck icon that appear on your dock every time you launch your Adium? Now you can change your duck with this cute looking dinosaur (even though the creator named it Lino, I prefer calling it Dino).

Download Lino

Adium - Change Dock Icon

Go under Adium Preference Pane. You can find it by clicking the Adium text beside the apple or by using keyboard shortcut Command-[ ,].
And then under the Appearance Tab, search for something called Dock Icon.
Go under Adium Preference Pane. You can find it by clicking the Adium text beside the apple or by using keyboard shortcut Command-[ ,].
And then under the Appearance Tab, search for something called Dock Icon.
There is a lot of Dock Icons you can choose. Pull Down Menu and Show All… Button contain the same icon.
For better speed, use Pull Down Menu
However, you can use Show All... Button for wider scope

Categories: Applications, Email and Chat, Icons, Tips and Tricks
Tags: Adium

Subscribe to RSS Leave a Comment (0)

Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users