Twitter is a great way to stay in touch with people around you. Confused? Watch Twitter in Plain English below:

We've done a Review of Free Twitter Clients, but Lifehacker found a method that is pretty unique.

For this to work you must have the latest version of Fluid (review). Fluid is a site specific browser, meaning the entire browser works on one site. This is extremely useful for web apps like Gmail, Google Docs or even Twitter.

The video below from Fluid's blog shows you how to use Hahlo and Fluid to make a sweet Twitter client:

You can even enable Growl support! The end result is a surprisingly good Twitter experience:

Are you on Twitter? Follow MacintoshTips.

Firefox 3 was recently released to the world. Here are some links covering its launch:

• Power User's Guide to Firefox 3 - lifehacker.com
• Firefox 3 Sets Record 8 Million Downloads in 24 Hours - spreadfirefox.com
• IE Sends Mozilla a New Cake for Firefox 3 - arcanology.com
• Firefox 3 Sets Record 8 Million Downloads in 24 Hours - spreadfirefox.com
• Firefox Inside Firefox - seejay.wordpress.com
• Firefox 3 Memory Usage - pavlov.net
• Some new CSS features in Firefox 3 - dbaron.org
• Firefox 3 for Developers - mozilla.org
• Animated PNG's in Firefox 3 - ajaxian.com (example)
• Firefox 3 suffers its first vulnerability - cnet.com
• Firefox 3 gets the Colbert Bump - hulu.com
• Firefox 3 Launch Crashes Servers - huffingtonpost.com
• Browser Benchmark - zdnet.com (however - webkit.org)

While working in Finder, sometimes I need to jump to Terminal.app to perform a command.

To do this I generally:

• Launch the Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app)
• Type cd
• Then drag the little icon from the Finder toolbar on to the Terminal

This copies the current path from Finder in to the command line.

This works fine, but there are a couple of unnecessary steps here. Fortunately MacWorld points us to a good solution: Open Terminal Here.

Open Terminal Here is an AppleScript that opens the current Finder window in Terminal.app.

To install Open Terminal Here:

• Unzip
• Drag on to your Finder toolbar

Your done:

Now to open the current directory in Terminal.app, simply click the icon.

Another utility that does this is the similarly named OpenTerminal. With OpenTerminal you can add this to the right-click menu and more.

Also, to quickly open Finder to your Terminal's directory type:

open .

Other things you can do include customizing the icon:

Or making Open Terminal Here create a new tab if Terminal.app is already running.

Here are two handy tips for working in text editors, guaranteed to increase your productivity.

Lewis writes:

Holding alt whilst dragging in the mouse in a cocoa text editor will change the cursor to a crosshair and allow you to 'block' select text in a square. This is particularly useful when working with tabular data.

As Lewis notes, this is a handy tip when working with tabular data and also when removing the first a column of characters in a text block.

This works in most text applications, including TextEdit and Word. Unfortunately there are some other text editors that don't seem to support this, like ecto and TextMate (Update: It looks like in TextMate you press ALT once. Thanks everyone!).

This is what selecting columns of text looks like:

Another useful way to work with text is by increasing or decreasing the indentation.

In many OS X text fields you can change this by pressing either:

• Command+] and Command+[ or
• Tab and Shift+Tab.

The tab version is fairly obvious but the Command+] is more subtle.

What are your tips for working with text fields?

Either reply in the comments or submit a tip and get some traffic to your site.

An easy way to change the default application for a file is to right click (Control+Click) a file and hold option while selecting an application from the "Always Open With" menu.

Please note this only changes the default application for that one file--not every file with this type. See our other post for assigning default applications.

I apologize for the lack of posting lately. Please bear with us--more content coming soon.

I'm pleased to announce a new version of the MacTips Widget is available: Download v2.1.

There are some big changes in this version, like:

Smaller Logo and Ability for Widget to Get Much Smaller

Plus you can remove the search bar and post dates. Expect more options here in the future.

Show Only Titles

In addition to shortening articles, you can also show only titles by moving the article length slider (on the back) to zero. This is demonstrated below:

New MacTech Tab

We've also added a new MacTech tab for some great Mac news. Also note, using the search on the MacTech tab will also take you to the MacTech's search engine.

New Back Design

The back has been spruced up a little. and now uses a much smaller image (4KB vs 100KB).

Also added the show search field and show post date fields for customizing the Widget a little more.

Other Small Features

You can scroll with:

• Up/Down Arrow Keys
• Home / End Keys
• Page Up / Down Keys

I will work on more keyboard accessibility issues in the future.

A couple of other smaller bugs were squished.

Let me know if you have any issues by using the contact information on the back of the widget.

Download here.

I'd love to hear any and all feature suggestions. Please send me an e-mail with ideas using the info on the back of the widget.

Enjoy!

Below are 5 user submitted Mac Tips. Submit your own tip and get some traffic to your blog.

5. More Custom Icons

Alex Writes:

I've always liked the new Finder, Dashboard and Trash icons float has, but http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1420 has some great Finder icons to spiff up my dock, http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1408 has some gorgeous trash icons, and http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1886 has some very cool dashboard icons.

If you like icons you should also check out these Indiana Jones icons from IconFactory (thanks Pirillo).

View our old post on Using Custom Icons in OS X.

4. Quick Equalizer in iTunes

Alex writes:

I found out that clicking the play button in iTunes a little bit to the left of the main thing on the top with the time and the Song name and the artist shows a cool sound thingy with the audio being measured.

3. Freeze a Window While Minimizing

We've talked about using slow motion while minimizing before. This builds on that by killing the dock in the middle of minimizing and making the window get stuck in this state.

shpountik writes:

You can make any window curve. To do this you should enter the following command in Terminal:

$ killall Dock

while minimizing this window (with Shift pressed).

View the video below for the effect (e-mail RSS click the title to see):

While this isn't entirely useful it's a neat trick.

2. Take Screenshots of DVD's

Ductapeinnovations writes:

To take a screenshot with DVD player open, use the terminal. Just type in

screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png

Of course replace dvd.png with the desired filename and Desktopwith the desired folder. For more info: Random Tech.

The complete steps are:

1. In Terminal type: screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png
2. Control+Tab to DVD
3. Use cursor to select DVD picture
4. Open dvd.png on your desktop

This is a good tip, but an even easier method I think is using VLC. It's the best video player on any platform. It will play anything and it doesn't have restrictions on taking screenshots of videos. Oh, and it's free.

1. More Finder Shortcuts

Robby writes:

Two other ⌥-⌘-mouse click keyboard shortcuts for OS X exist that I'm aware of besides the one you wrote about on May 15th - click on a Dock Icon to hide all other applications.

1. ⌥-⌘-click on the Toolbar Button in a Finder window with the Toolbar showing to get the Customize Toolbar dialog box. ⌘-click on it cycles you through the different Toolbar views.

2. ⌥-⌘-double-click on a file name in a Finder window closes that window and opens the file in a new window.

I was able to get the second one working, but not the first one. Anybody else?

The second one is great for keeping your Finder windows in order.

Submit a Mac Tip

I thought it would be interesting to list multiple user submitted tips in one entry instead of many smaller entries.

What are your thoughts on this method?

Submit a Mac Tip and get some traffic to your blog--or just help contribute to the community!

The System Preferences panel has many overlooked settings. Here are my favorite 5.

5. Smooth Scrolling

One small but important feature I found inside System Preferences -> Appearance is called Use smooth scrolling.

Enabling smooth scrolling makes the page glide up and down the screen without any rigidness.

This only applies when using the page up/down, spacebar and home/end keys while navigating a page.

The difference here is subtle, but I'm a fan. I often use the spacebar while reading news feeds and it's made the experience surprisingly better.

4. Great Screensavers Custom & Built-in

OS X has some great screensavers built right in. There's the standard Flurry screensaver:

But there's also iTunes Artwork, RSS Visualizer and Word of the Day:

Leopard added Arabesque, a vibrant grid of blurring dots, to the collection:

But you can also use custom screensavers. Apple also has a good variety of these, along with Google.

One really cool screensaver I found is called Lotsawater. It renders a cool water effect over your desktop:

3. Easily Search and Find

This isn't so much a preference as it is a feature of System Preferences.

Finding preferences is extremely easy--even if you don't know where to look.

The search box knows all of the options inside the panels, and will take you to the correct place when you hit enter.

2. Customize Default Alert Sound Effect

I wish I would have thought about customizing this setting sooner. The default Funk sound effect that plays as an alert is downright terrible compared to Morse.

There are a dozen alert sounds, so I suggest finding the one that best fits you inside System Preferences -> Sound -> Sound Effects.

1. Customizing Global Keyboard Shortcuts

Inside System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts you will find a list of global keyboard shortcuts you may want to change or disable entirely.

For example I find it annoying to have Front Row set to Command+Escape. Sometimes while pressing Command+` I slip and Front Row pops up and completely interrupts my workflow.

The solution here is either changing or disabling the Front Row keyboard shortcut.

You can set many other keyboard shortcuts here, including:

• Look up in dictionary shortcut
• Take Screenshot with your keyboard
• Super Zoom
• Invert screen colors
• and many more...

I thought this was cool. The MacTips widget was featured on the iCreate CD as one of their top widgets.

If you'd like to check it out it's issue #54. Here are some shots:

Speaking of the widget, expect a new release very soon. There are lots of new features so I need some beta testers. If you'd like to try the new widget and provide feedback shoot me an e-mail at (brad at mactips dot org).

Doing one more poll to gauge the response from everyone.

What level of tips would you like to see?

If you can't see the poll you may have to click the title to vote.

[poll=19]