Adium is really filled with a ton of different keyboard shortcuts. I have been using it as my primary chat client for over a year now, but I am still discovering all sorts of ways to use it more efficiently and only now starting to use a handful of its keyboard shortcuts.

A great set of keyboard shortcuts that I recently noticed are for setting status messages. Here they are:

• To set your status as available, press Command-Y.
• To set a custom available message, press Shift-Command-Y.
• To set a custom away message, press Option-Command-Y

You can find all sorts of other keyboard shortcuts in Adium by navigating through all the menus in the menu bar and looking at the key combinations to the right of many of Adium’s features.

View our other Adium Tips.

Tabs are a very well-known and popular feature in nearly all web browsers. There are a couple methods to open new ones in Safari–my favorite is double-clicking on the tab bar (described here). To close tabs in Safari, one typically clicks on the little “x” at the left-hand side of the tab, presses Command-W, or selects Close Tab from the File menu.

I discovered a new keyboard shortcut in Safari today that offers another easy way to close a tab, which is a part of the Twicetab Safari plug-in. After installing Twicetab, Command-Clicking or Option-Clicking on tabs in the tab bar magically close them! This fits in well with the keyboard shortcut that allows you to Command-Click on a link to open it in a new tab.

Twicetab was originally a very useful application for its feature that allows you to double-click on the tab bar to open up a new tab, but after the Safari 3.1 update came out, I figured Twicetab would be nearly obsolete. However, this additional feature in Twicetab makes it definitely worth checking out.

Twicetab is developed by Infinite Labs, who also develop Afloat, which we covered a couple days ago.

A cool little tidbit I discovered in my favorite GTD application, OmniFocus, is that you can put a space-seperated list of times into the time estimate field for projects or tasks, and OmniFocus will add them up. Simply type in a time in the typical OmniFocus format (1m, 1h, etc.), type a space, and then enter another time. When you press enter or click outside of the time estimate box, OmniFocus will combine the times and give out the total.

For example, if I enter “10m 9m 2h 4m 6h” in the time estimate box, OmniFocus will convert it to 8h 23m.

I really enjoy the feature in iCal that allows me to arrange my events into multiple “Calendars,” which each have different colors. Typically, to choose which calendar an event goes into, you just select that calendar from the sidebar and new events will go into there, or you will select the calendar from the Edit pop-up for your event.

A cool alternative way to assign a calendar to an event is by simply dragging-and-dropping it. Select any event and drag it over any of the local calendars in your calendar list, and the event will be reassigned to that calendar! Oddly, iCal does not allow transferring multiple events simultaneously using this method.

Another way to switch an event’s calendar is to Control-Click on it and select Calendar, and then whichever calendar you want it reassigned to. This method works on multiple events if you select more than one by using Command-Click or Shift-Click.

A couple weeks ago, my iPhone firmware somehow got corrupted and iTunes instructed me to restore it in order for it to work again. I took iTunes’ advice and restored the iPhone, but my iPhone still didn’t seem to work. It entered a strange mode where all I could see was a black screen with the Apple logo and a spinning “loading” circle.

A few days later, I went to the Apple Store and discovered that my iPhone’s problem was actually pretty obvious. Each time I restored the iPhone, iTunes asked me if I wanted to retrieve my data from a backup, and I agreed. The problem with this is that iTunes actually backed up the corrupted version on the iPhone, so each time I restored from the backup, I re-corrupted the iPhone!

I find it perfectly logical that Apple would offer to restore my iPhone, but I do not find it very logical that Apple wouldn’t warn me before backing up a corrupted iPhone.

I have recently been liking posting with ecto less and less, and a glitch in the application that caused me to lose an entire nearly finished 300+ word post on some features in Aperture pushed me to purchase MarsEdit to replace ecto for posting to MacTips. Not only do I enjoy using MarsEdit more than ecto, it fits better into my general Mac workflow, as it is closer to OS X’s natural UI.

One nice thing I’ve observed in MarsEdit is that you can control MarsEdit’s main window very intuitively and easily with the keyboard. Pressing Tab allows you to navigate through the window’s three main sections–the post list, the post preview pane, and the blog list, as well as the search bar in the top bar, if you have it activated. There are two other parts to MarsEdit’s keyboard functionality, although those are one’s more common to OS X applications

The first is a pretty obvious one–you can use the arrow keys to scroll through the preview post, or to select items in the blog list or post list.

The second is also quite intuitive–to open a post while in the post list, simply select it and press Return.

Although none of these three small tips do very much alone, when they are used together, navigating MarsEdit with solely the keyboard becomes quite easy.

My absolute favorite advance in web browsing technology over the past decade or so is the idea of single-window browsing, or at least of multiple tabs in a single window. Just about every browser out there now allows you to keep all the different web pages you have open in a single window as multiple tabs.

The impression I have gotten as a user is that the tab feature originally was targeted mainly at keeping your web browsing session organized and not having too many windows open, but it later transformed into something that changed the outlook of web browsing for many; tabs became a must-have feature of browsers, and may users now use tabs far more than windows.

Safari has a couple of primary ways to let you use tabs. You can press Command-T, select “New Tab” from the File menu in the menu bar, or double-click on the tab bar (added in Safari 3.1) to open an empty new tab up. To open a link in a new tab, you can hold down Command before clicking it. However, some sites manage to override Safari’s commands to open pages in new tabs, and just open the link up in the same page or in a new window.

Finally, in Safari 3.1, Apple has provided us with a hidden feature that forces every single web page to open links in new tabs when you ask it to.

Simply launch the Terminal from the Utilities folder in the Applications folder and type or copy this command into it, and then restart Safari:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

If for some reason you change your mind and want to revert to your previous setting, use this command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool false

[Terminal Command Via Mac OS X Tips]

Deleting songs from your iTunes library is usually very easy. You can either select a song, Control-Click on it and then select “Delete”, or you can simply press Delete from the keyboard, and iTunes will bring up a little window asking if you are sure that you “want to remove the selected song from your iTunes library.” (Seen below.) Select “Remove,” and iTunes brings up another window asking if you want to keep the file in the iTunes Music folder or to move it to the trash. Answer iTunes, and you are done deleting the song from your iTunes Music library. However, this method only works while browsing within the main iTunes library, and not while viewing a song from within a playlist.

Following the first steps of removing a song from your iTunes library while in a playlist leads to a prompt that asks if you want to remove the song from the playlist, not the library. (Seen below.) In order to actually remove the song from the entire library while viewing it from the playlist, press Option-Delete instead of just Delete, and you will get the same prompt as from before in the library! (Seen above.)

View more iTunes Tips.

I have always found the little button and microphone included on my iPhone headphones a really useful and thoughtful feature. I’ve always known that while listening to music the button could be used for pausing and playing the music, and pressing the button with a call coming in would answer the phone. However, while using my iPhone’s iPod feature more than ever while on “vacation” in Israel this week, I discovered even more use from the little button.

While listening to music, pressing the little headphone button two times in rapid succession skips to the next track!

I admit that this tip is very basic and many of you probably know about it already, but it definitely boosted my “iPod productivity” significantly ever since I started using it.

I think that this feature should work on all recent iPods, but I don’t believe any other ones come with the same button or even a similar one. (Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.)

NetNewsWire is a great, free, and extensible newsfeed reading client. One of the great features it includes is an infinite supply of stylesheets available to customize the look of the articles you read. NetNewsWire comes with a bunch of its own stylesheets, but you can download more online.

The coolest stylesheet I’ve found is called Ollicle Wittrodt. Most stylesheets grab feed items and convert them into a simpler, uniform format. Ollicle Wittrodt, on the other hand, displays the original page within the NetNewsWire viewing tab. I’ve been using this stylesheet for a few weeks now and am really enjoying looking at articles in their original contexts without having to send the items to Safari.

To enable Ollicle Wittrodt, download it from here, unzip and open it, then tell NetNewsWire to install it. Just select it from the styles menu (bottom-right). You need to enable JavaScript for the stylesheet to work, so open NetNewsWire’s preferences, select the Browsing pane and then the News Items pane, and check “Enable JavaScript.”

Ranchero Software, the company behind NetNewsWire, has a huge list of NetNewsWire stylesheets available here. You can also try making your own stylesheets with a little bit of CSS work, which is at least partially described by Ranchero here, also.