The Dock is the primary method for launching applications in OS X. For me, Quicksilver replaces a lot of what I would normally do with the Dock, but I still find it to be an essential tool for my application needs.

By default, the Dock appears at the bottom of the screen. However, it can be repositioned to either the left or right sides of the screen. To do this, one would usually launch System Preferences from their Applications folder, select the Dock pane, and set the position to either left, bottom, or right. Another common method is to Control-Click on the divider used to resize the Dock, go to "Position," and select whichever position you want.

MacTips user Alex Hwang submitted an alternative way to move the Dock around. Hold down Shift and then click on the divider and drag the divider across the screen. When you get near the left side, the bottom, or the right side of the screen, the Dock will pop into place there. This is much more convenient than going through a bunch of menus.

We have written many more tips on how to manipulate and customize the Dock to fit your needs and wishes. One of my favorites is a Terminal script for switching Leopard's "shelf" dock back to a more traditional style. You can find everything else we've written about the Dock here.

Thanks to Alex Hwang for submitting this shortcut! Submit a tip to MacTips and maybe we will put it up!

The number of possible data fields in Address Book often seems endless. Everything from addresses and instant messenger screen names to the names of a contact's brother or assistant are possible. One of the fields that I have only recently started playing around with is the Related Names field. This field allows you to link contacts together based on their relationships. You can add as many related names as you want to a contact. Once you have added a related name, you can open the related contact's card by clicking on the field descriptor to the left of their name and selecting "Show [Name]."

While most features in any Apple program work completely intuitively and intelligently, one part of the Related Names field is not. It is actually quite stupid. If you want to set up a relationship like husband and wife or mother and child, you have to manually edit both of the contacts and set up the Related Names field! This flaw really cripples this feature in Address Book, but luckily, tl.software has a great freeware plug-in for the application that solves the issue.

This plug-in is Relationship Completer, a great tool that does exactly what it says: it completes relationships. Once you install Relationship Completer by placing the plug-in file in ~/Library/Address Book Plug-ins and restarting Address Book, the plug-in will add another item to the contextual menu that pops up when you click on the field title to the left of the related name. Clicking the new item will add automate adding the Related Names field to the related contact in the appropriate format (brother to sibling, father to child, spouse to spouse). Hopefully OS X 10.6 or OS 11 will include an improved Address Book which automatically does this, but Relationship Completer is the best solution at the moment.

I have always been a big fan of Address Book and all its related plug-ins. Most of its features and a handful of plug-ins were covered in Get the Most Out of Address Book, and we also have a few articles on integrating Address Book with Mutt and with Adium. Hawk Wings also has a large archive of Address Book tips worth looking at. (That's where I found Relationship Completer!)

[Via Hawk Wings]

Dashboard is one of the best tools available in OS X. With a single click of the keyboard, or a flick of the mouse, you can bring up a whole screen covered in miniature applications providing everything from statistics to new Mac tips. But because Dashboard is just so useful, sometimes you end up with too many widgets and an cluttered Dashboard. Jason Barry's Multidash appears to be the solution to this.

Multidash is a small, but powerful, widget that sits on your Dashboard storing a list of alternate Dashboard layouts. Once it is installed, a few simple clicks allow you to multiply your Dashboard real estate by as many times as you want.

The widget is very simple to use, albeit disappointingly glitchy. Furthermore, when it switches between Dashboards it "kills" your dock, so minimized windows pop open again before the new Dashboard layout opens.

Although Multidash has its problems, it is still a formidable widget that accomplishes its task. If you work on a smaller screen or just have a ton of widgets, Multidash may be the solution to all your Dashboard problems.

If you aren't satisfied by what Multidash has to offer, there are a few other solutions to a cluttered Dashboard. One thing to try is moving widgets to the desktop. You could also take a look at Virtual Dashboard, which offers a similar feature set to Multidash.

Thanks to Geoffrey Morris for submitting this tip! Submit your own tip too and maybe we'll post it!

Twitter is a really incredible internet phenomenon, it mixes blogging and instant messaging.

To learn more about Twitter, visit Twitter in Plain English.

There are many amazing Twitter applications for OS X. We have even discussed many different free Twitter clients here on MacTips.

My personal favorite Twitter client, however, is Twitterific, which is offered both in a $15 ad-free version and in a free moderately ad-filled version. Twitterific is not only a very aesthetically appealing application, but also takes advantage of being a Mac application and is easy to control with the keyboard.

The first of Twitterific's keyboard abilities is obvious. Once it is the frontmost application, pressing Tab will move OS X's focus from the tweet list to the "What are you doing?" text box. You can obviously type in the text box and press enter to tweet, and use the up and down arrow keys to navigate through tweets.

To further take advantage of the keyboard in Twitterific, try pressing the left arrow key after selecting a tweet with the keyboard or mouse in the list. Twitterific will immediately send a new window or tab to your default web browser displaying the profile (with others) of the Twitter user who's tweet you selected.

Another keyboard feature in Twitterific allows you to enable a hotkey to toggle the Twitterific window. To access this feature, click on the wrench icon at the bottom left of the Twitterific window and select the pane titled "Window."

Where the settings asks you for a hotkey, enter any combination of modifiers and a letter or number, and you have your shortcut! Pressing that key combination will open or close Twitterific every time.

To truly take advantage of Twitterific, you'll have to follow MacTips, of course!

The Associated Press recently launched an iPhone-friendly web application containing all their news articles in an attractive and convenient format. They join many other web sites to create Mobile Safari editions of their services, and offer some excellent features.

To access the Associated Press iPhone view, visit apnews.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch. The site features categorized headlines, a powerful search tool, local news, categories, and intelligent customization settings. The site fits the iPhone user interface excellently and is probably the best implementation I have seen for a news application.

A little-known feature in Apple's Pages is a "Two Up" page view. The "Two Up" view allows you to see two pages of a document next to each other vertically, so the document appears more like a book. If you are working on a large monitor with smaller-than-normal pages, this feature could be quite useful and increase your productivity.

To switch between the "One Up" (the default) and "Two Up" page views, click on the tiny box at the bottom left of any pages window where the percent-size of the page you are viewing is shown. A small pop-up menu will then allow you to select whether you want "One Up" or "Two Up" view.

From that same menu, you can select "Fit Width" which will resize the pages so they can fit perfectly in your Pages window. This feature works with "One Up" view as well, of course.

Gizmodo recently posted out that keyboard localization and accents in SMS messages can lead to bloodbaths, so I figured it would be useful to point out how easy it is to put accents over letters on the iPhone; maybe it will save some lives.

The default view when the iPhone keyboard pops up on your screen shows a QWERTY keyboard, a shift key, a space bar, a delete key, a return key, and a button at the bottom-left that sends you off to find more symbols to type. All these buttons, yet there are no dedicated ones for accents. However, typing accents is quite possible. To add an accent to a letter, hold your finger over any key that permits accents and wait about one second. The button expands and a menu pops up above it with keys for any possible accents! Now just drag your finger to the accent you are looking for and let go, and the accented letter will appear.

To insert accents over capital letters, do the exact same thing except press the shift key before entering the accented letter.

Furthermore, This feature does not only apply to letters, but also to some symbols. In the ".?123" symbols and numbers view, exclamation points and question marks can be flipped upside down by using this trick.

Inserting accented characters is a really well thought-out feature of the iPhone keyboard and should actually be expanded. For example, Apple could add "sub-keys" to the number keys on the numbers and symbols page of the keyboard that correspond to the symbols inserted when one holds shift and presses on them on a standard QWERTY keyboard on their computer.

Although this would be less useful on an iPod Touch which does not have the iPhone's SMS capabilities, I assume it is available on iPod Touches as well. If anyone could confirm this in the comments, that would be great!

Adium just keeps getting better and better. While messing around with one of Adium's features the other day, I found a way to split up your contact list into multiple sections, by group.

To break up your contact list, hold Command and drag the header for any of your groups off of the window it is currently in.

You can put two windows of groups together either by holding Command and dragging them back in the same way, or simply dragging (without Command) one of the windows under the other one until it snaps into place, and then letting go. Another way is to press Command-W while the focus is on the window which you want to attach to the main window.

You can combine this trick with this one, which allows you to create a group for offline contacts, and then split those off to the side.

Another way to use this trick productively is to use it when combining contacts, which we discussed here. If you have a long list of contacts and/or are combining contacts from multiple groups, being able to split your contacts list up makes combining contacts much more manageable.

Like many of Adium's features, this trick is very flexible and can be taken advantage of in more than one way, so try playing around with it a little bit and see what it can do.

The iPhone's video sub-application (it is technically part of the iPod application) contains everything you'd expect from a solid video player. By tapping on the screen, you get a pop-up on the bottom and top of the screen that allows you to pause, play, fast-forward, or rewind the video, to adjust the volume, to change how far into the video you are, to adjust the aspect ratio, and to close the video. These are really the standard features that just about every video player has (except maybe the the aspect ratio), but there are some more lesser known tricks hidden within the video player.

One of these features is the ability to play a video forward in slow motion. To do this, pause the video and then press down on and hold onto the fast-forward button. This will play the video in slow motion, and even includes the slowed down sound. Oddly, I could not find any way to play a video in slow motion in reverse.

Like most non-phone-related iPhone features, I assume this works on the iPod Touch, but if anyone could confirm that, it would be great.

earthlingsofts' Mailboxer is one of the great Mail.app add-ons available for keeping all your emails neat and organized. It takes any list of contacts that you provide it with and magically creates a smart mailbox for each one that includes all emails on your computer that somehow involve them.

Download and run Mailboxer, and you will be prompted for which group of contacts you would like Mailboxer to grab the list of smart mailboxes to be created from. The list of groups comes directly from Address Book, of course, so a neat trick to taking full advantage of Mailboxer is to create a group or smart group specifically for Mailboxer. After selecting which group from which Mailboxer is to fetch the list of contacts, you can give a name to the folder that all the smart mailboxes that Mailboxer creates will be put into. Once you're done with those steps, click on "Create Smart Mailboxes," and Mailboxer will do its work and then restart Mail for you.

Another trick to take advantage of Mailboxer is to use it multiple times. You can have it set up one folder of smart mailboxes for one group of contacts and another folder for a whole different group.

Even another way to manipulate Mailboxer for your benefit is to observe that the smart mailboxes that Mailboxer creates are the exact same as any you might create. Mailboxer's smart mailboxes use the criteria "From Contains [email]" or "Any Recipient Contains [email]." This would be incredibly tedious for a large group of contacts, but you can always change the smart mailbox criteria to be slightly different. For example, you could change the mailboxes so that they only showed emails that were from a specific contact, or only emails that were to that contact.