Tweetie on the iPhone and Mac OS X is one of our favorite Twitter client, the iPhone version is available on the App Store for US$2.99. Many has considered it the best Twitter client yet. But Tweetie will soon no longer be available. Well, Twitter the company has purchased the Tweetie app, and will soon renamed it simply as Twitter for iPhone. And the good news is it will be free.

Twitter has released official client for Blackberry beginning of April and the official Twitter app for Android is released on 30 April. So expect the rebranded Tweetie within days if not sooner.

Tweetie for Mac is a nicely designed Twitter app for the Mac OS X. Beautifully crafted except for the dock icon. Matthew Rex is kind enough to make available the same icon used in Tweetie 2 for iPhone. Here’s how you can replace the default Tweetie for Mac icon with a new look:

• Download the icons from Marcelo’s blog site. Link Here.

• The download contains files and folders. Look inside the folder “ICNS” which has two icon files ‘Tweetie (Metal).icns’ and ‘Tweetie (Gloss).icns’. Choose the one you like and rename it “Tweetie.icns”

• Quit Tweetie if it is running

• Go to you Applications folder and locate the Tweetie app file. Mouse right-click or Ctrl-click to pop up a menu, select the option “Show Package Contents”. The Tweetie app content is displayed in a folder.

• Look under the folder Contents>Resources and you should be able to locate the existing icon file “Tweetie.icns”. Replace it with the one you just downloaded and renamed.

• Close the Tweetie app content folder.

That’s it. If Tweetie is on the dock, remove it from the dock and put it back again to get the new icon.

The View Source command (Option-Command-U) in Safari displays HTML source code in plain text. You might get color envy when you view the nicely formatted, colored syntax highlighted HTML source using Firefox or Chrome. Here are three ways you can get colored syntax highlighting in Safari.

1. Using Web Inspector Under Developer Menu

HTML source code colored syntax highlighting is available in Safari Web Inspector under the Developer menu. This option is not enabled by default. Open Safari Preferences and select the advanced tab. Checked the tick box “Show Developer menu in menu bar” to enable the Developer menu.

You should see the addition of a “Developer” menu next to the “Window” menu. Open up Web Inspector from menu Developer->Show Web Inspector or using Option-Command-I. A new window will pop up occupied the bottom half of your Safari window, displaying the HTML source with colored syntax highlighting.

Web Inspector looks intimidating as it is meant for more than just syntax highlighting.

2. Using SafariSource Plugin

SafariSource is a Safari plugin for viewing color syntax HTML source. It adds a preference pane to Safari’s preferences for you to control the colors and stylings for the syntax highlighting.

SafariSource works through the popular SIMBL plugin framework which enable plugins for Safari to work. SIMBL Installer is included in the SafariSource download as you need to run it first before installing SafariSource plugin.

One caveat of using SafariSource under Safari in Snow Leopard is the plugin currently is only compatible with 32-bit mode of Safari. Running Safari in 32-bit mode in Snow Leopard is not recommended as you losses the crash protection and other improvement available in 64-bit Safari.

3. Using Web Services

This is not specific to Safari, but can get the job done if you do not feel like launching another browser. You can view source code with color syntax using web sites such as http://pygments.org/ or http://www.hilite.me/. It is less convenient as you need to copy the source from the clipboard and then paste the HTML codes into the web form.

Mac OS X comes with a capable screen capture tool built-in. You probably already know that using Command-Shift-3 is for capturing the whole screen, and Command-Shift-4 will give you a crosshair cursor to choose the area of the screen you want to capture. Both Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4 will output the screen capture as PNG file to you Desktop with a name “Screen shot xxxx” where xxxx will be the timestamp.

Instead of capturing to file, you can capture the image to Mac OS X system clipboard memory. This will allow you to paste the screen image into another application such as Photoshop or Pages. To capture screen into clipboard memory, use Control-Command-Shift-3 for whole screen or Control-Command-Shift-4 for portion of screen.

You can also capture specific window or object on the screen using the Command-Shift-4 or Control-Command-Shift-4 screen capture shortcuts:

• Press Command-Shift-4 or Control-Command-Shift-4. The cursor changes to crosshair.

• Press the spacebar to toggle the cursor into a camera icon.

• Move the camera cursor to the window or object that you want to capture. The window or object will be highlighted when the cursor is over them.

• Click the mouse anywhere on the highlighted window or object to take the screenshot.

Flash is a bad idea, according to Steve and Apple. To avoid Flash from ruining your desktop experience with 100% CPU usage, you can block Flash from loading into Safari on your Mac OS X using this little ClickToFlash plugin.

Once installed, Flash content will not be loaded. Instead a gradient gray area will occupy the Flash content. Click on the blank area if you want to load the Flash anyway.

You can choose to turn on or off the plugin from its settings page. To access the plugin settings, either click on the icon on the left-top corner of blank gray area or from Safari menu Safari > ClickToFlash > Settings.

The advantages of ClickToFlash are numerous. Since Flash isn’t loaded until you specifically ask for it, your CPU usage will stay at normal levels when browsing the web. This has tons of benefits: web browsing stays speedy, your Mac laptop won’t get as hot, and your Mac’s fan won’t come on as often. In fact, we guarantee* that ClickToFlash will quintuple your battery life and that it will protect those precious parts of your body on which you rest your laptop! (*note: not actually guaranteed)

With ClickToFlash, you can setup the plugin to load YouTube video in H.264 format instead of Flash. H.264 video perform favorably compared to Flash video in Safari.

You can use Finder, Disk Utility, iTunes, iPhoto, or iDVD to burn files into writable CD or DVD. Apple Support has a summary guide on how to go about burning a CD or DVD. If you want to burn a disc image file (commonly in ISO disc format and with an ISO extension), a separate Apple Support article describes how you can burn a disk image file on a CD or DVD in Mac OS X.

However, if you have DVD Video files in VIDEO_TS folder, there is no quick method using the bundled apps in Mac OS X to burn a DVD-Video disc to be playable in regular DVD players.

Burn is an open source and free app that can help you burn the disc to the correct DVD Video format.

Or if you prefer the command line using Terminal, the steps are:

• Create a new folder to house your VIDEO_TS folder, for example ~/Downloads/XMas2008/VIDEO_TS.

• On a Terminal session, enter the following command:

  hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name MY_DVD_NAME -o MY_DVD.iso /path/to/folder/containing/VIDEO_TS

  Using the above example:

  hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name XMas2008 -o XMas2008.iso ~/Downloads/Xmas2008/

• Make sure that /path/to/folder/containing/VIDEO_TS is the path to the folder containing the VIDEO_TS folder, not the VIDEO_TS folder itself.

• The command will create an ISO disk image file XMas2008.iso.

• Start Disk Utility, drag the newly created XMas2008.iso into Disk Utility and click the Burn button to create the DVD-Video disc.

Snow Leopard comes with subtle changes that refine the Mac OS X experience, minimize application windows to application icon is one of them.

When you minimize a window under Mac OS X, the default behavior is to shrink the window into the thumbnails of the dock, one icon per window. This leads to irritating Doc clutter if you have a number of minimized windows.

Snow Leopard has an additional entry “Minimize windows into application icon” in its System Preferences > Dock settings where you can select to hide minimize windows into application icon instead of thumbnails of the dock.

You can accessed minimized windows as usual from the application’s Window menu or from the icon menu by Control-Click on the app icon on the Dock. Minimized windows also appear below at the bottom in Dock Expose when you click and hold the app icon on the Dock. Similarly minimized windows appear at the bottom when you activate Expose.

Once in a while you might come across CD images in the format of a .bin file and .cue file. These are format popularized by CDRWin which is a Windows program. In order to use the CD image in Mac, you have to convert the bin/cue format into the disk format supported by Mac OS X using third party application.

Roxio Toast CD burning software is able to convert bin/cue format into Mac OS X disk format. But this will set you back at least $80. Or you can use the free and open source command line tool bchunk to convert the bin/cue files into iso image that can be mounted on Mac OX X.

It is recommended to obtain bchunk from MacPorts:

• Download and install MacPort if you have not done so. MacPorts is a community driven effort to make it easy to obtain and update open source software on the Mac OS X.

• Open the Terminal app and install bchunk port using the following command line:

sudo port install bchunk

• Let say your bin/cue files are image.bin and image.cue, you can now convert the bin/cue file to iso using the following command:

bchunk image.bin image.cue outputimage

bchunk will create the disk image outputimage.iso which you can open for it to be mounted on your Mac.

Canon comes with great software for their EOS Digital SLR camera. ImageBrowser (ZoomBrowser on Windows), Digital Photo Professional (for RAW file processing) and other utilities software are indispensable if you own a Canon EOS DSLR. The problem is Canon’s distribution policy for their camera software, you need the original CDs that comes with the camera in order to be able to install them on your Mac. The updates available from Canon’s download site are just updates that expect you already have the software installed.

This create problem if you have lost your EOS software CD, or you purchase the camera from another user who has lost the EOS software CD. Turns out that there is an easy way to work around this ‘problem’:

• Download as per normal the latest EOS camera software from Canon’s download site.
• The download is dmg file which will be mounted as volume
• Copy the updater software to your desktop
• Control-click on the updater software and select “Show Package Contents”
• Navigate to the folder Contents > Resources and delete the file “update.plist”

Now you can double click the updater software file and it should install without any issues.

When you are writing for the web, such as blog posts or comments on forum, it is a good idea to learn the basic of HTML. HTML is the markup language for web pages, it is the formatting language understood by web browsers. Writing using HTML is not as easy as using a word processor such as Pages or MS Word for text formatting but it is simple enough for most computer users. Nonetheless there are alternative markup languages other than HTML that aims to make writing for the web even easier.

HTML basics

• To denote a paragraph, you enclose the text with the open tag <p> and closing tag </p>, for example

  <p>The PlayStation 3 Slim gaming console from Sony Computer Entertainment is not only smaller and cheaper, but adds hardware enhancements that make it speedier, including a new Cell microprocessor.</p>

• For headers, you use the tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>..etc and end the heading text with respective closing tags </h3></h2></h1>,,…etc.

  <h2>Third episode of new season’s Mad Men leaks out</h2> <p>The third episode of the Emmy-winning drama’s new season was briefly made available by mistake to holders of an iTunes Season Pass on Tuesday evening.</p>

  Continue reading »