We got special characters available via the Mac OS X system fonts, why not use them on mailbox folder? Using the Character Viewer menu item, we can quickly browse all these icons and insert them into any working document. This includes mailbox names in Mail. This should work in other mail clients as well.

Here’s a quick visual guide to pimping folders in Mail.

Step 1: Enable the Character Viewer menu item.

Select Language and Text in your System Preferences. This is found under the apple menu.

Under the Input Sources, select Keyboard & Character Viewer. This will enable the pull down menu item in your main menu.

Step 2: Look up and insert character.

In your Mail application, select the mailbox in place with one click to go into edit mode.

From your to main menu, Select Show Character Viewer from Character & Keyboard menu item.

Browse the available Symbols and find the one you want. Double clicking it will place the character in the Mail app.

Conclusion

These icons give a quick visual clue about to what they do. And help maintain my zero inbox goal. I’m following Merlin Mann’s oldie but goodie tip called Inbox Makeover. Make sure you check out his new upcoming book about it Inbox Zero.

I use Twitter for micro-blogging. I also like getting updates from random sources like my wife, witty friends, cnn, the white house, web developers and even Darth Vader. Ideally I would like to also receive certain RSS feeds in my Twitterrific/EventBox window but this functionality is not offered by Twitter yet. Luckily, twitterfeed.com is up to the task. Here’s a short guide on how to do RSS via Twitter.

Step 1: Set up an secondary Twitter account

Go to twitter.com and create a new account where you will be posting your RSS entries. In my case, I created an account with username melvitaxfeeds, named it My Feeds and set the posts as protected. There is no point in making this account public since this account is more like an RSS aggregator. Go to Settings > Picture and set the avatar to the RSS icon, this will help you recognize it as an RSS post when u see it in the timeline.

Step 2: Follow The New Twitter Account

Now you need to log in to your regular Twitter account and follow your feeds account. In my case, my main account melvitax is subscribed to the twits from my newly created melvitaxfeeds account.

Step 3: Set Up TwitterFeed

Log on twitterfeed.com and create a new feed. They support OpenID so I was able to log on with my Yahoo account. In the Add Feed form, enter your login info for your secondary feeds Twitter account. In my case, the melvitaxfeeds account. Then enter the URL of the RSS feed you would like to subscribe to. I am on the market for a used Mac Mini so I am subscribing to a Craigslist feed for any posts regarding the Mac Mini. Finish the form according to your liking and give it some time for it to do it’s thing. In my set up, TwitterFeed checks the RSS feed every half hour and will post up to 5 posts on the melvitaxfeeds Twitter account. If I decide to follow more feeds I can set the option for the Prefix so that I can tell what it is. For now I only have one feed so it’s no big deal.

Once set up these RSS feed entries will show up as twits wherever you do Twitter. Perhaps one day this will be a built in feature, but in the meantime… thank you TwitterFeed.

Be more Japanese I always say.
Here’s a guide to enjoy those emoji icons shipped in the iPhone which are only activated in Japan. This is not a hack, we are simply running an application that activates that built in feature of the iPhone.

Step 1: Check Your iPhone Software Version
If your version is less than 2.2.1 skip to Step 2. If you performed the iPhone 2.2.1 software update that was released a couple of days ago you can you need to temporarily downgrade to the previews version, activate emoti icons and then upgrade again to 2.2.1. Nothing is lost in this process, except for precious time.

To downgrade, press the option key while hitting the Restore button on iTunes. This should bring up a window with available software updates. In my case, I chose the last update, version 2.2_5g77. Run the restore action and perform the initial sync.

Step 2: Download and Install FrostyPlace

From the iTunes Store, download and install the FrostyPlace, a free chinese RSS reader. This can be performed from your computer or the iPhone.

[update] FrostyPlace is now charging but according to Eric Hust, the iPhone application Spell Number will accomplish the same and it is free. 

 Step 3: Read some chinese stories

Launch the application on the iPhone and just read some news. No kidding. Read for a minute or so and press them buttons. At some point for whatever reason, the app will activate emoji icons globally on the phone.

Step 4: Activate Emoji Icons

Go back to the iPhone spring board and select Settings. Then go to General > International > Keyboards > Japanese and activate Emoji. You might need to repeat Step 3 several times before Emoji shows up in this panel. I had to do it twice.

Once Emoji icons are activated they can become available in any application by clicking on the International Globe icon to the left of the keyboard. You can use it in SMS, Mail, Notes and anything you can type into. And best of all Emoji does not need to be activated on someone else’s iPhone for them to receive your cool new icons. But you can’t expect for non iPhones to get your cool new icons of course.

I am bilingual and want my iPhone to understand me when I switch between english and spanish. So I started browsing the all the new settings that have been added in the recent software updates. To my delight I was able to find out the iPhone now supports multiple languages by adding an International button right next to the space bar. Press that button and your keyboard changes to the next language you had pre-selected. You can then type and enjoy dictionary and auto-correction on the selected language. Press the International button again and you are back on english keyboard. Brilliant. The following is a short tutorial on how to set this up.

Step 1: From the Dashboard choose Settings

Step 2: From Settings choose General Settings

Step 3: From General Settings choose International

Step 4: From International choose Keyboards

Step 5: From Keyboards turn on the desired languages 

Usage:

Go back to the Dashboard and launch an application that uses the keyboard. If you stay in the default english keyboard, when you start typing a spanish word you will get the auto-correction hints based on the english dictionary. But now we have an International button next to the space bar to switch the keyboard language.

Press the International button next to the space bar to switch to the next language in line. The name of the language is displayed briefly in the space bar and then the the word “space” gets changed to the selected language equivalent.

Now, try typing again and you will notice the auto-correction hints will be based on the language dictionary. Press the international button again when you want to return to english typing. 

Conclusion:  When using roman languages it is not as easy mac os x multiple languages but if dealing with non-roman languages this is a brilliant  implementation. I’m sure my mom will hate the fact that Ican do spanglish on my iPhone, but at least I will spell both correctly.

One of the new features of Mac OS 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard, is .Mac’s Back to My Mac, a way to connect to your computer at home remotely. Back to My Mac allows a user log into another Mac remotely via internet. This is a great feature but it is only available if you are a .Mac subscriber. However, the new iChat supports Screen Sharing, so the only thing to figure out is how to auto-accept a Screen Share invitation and how to do it securely. This quick tutorial will show you how set up iChat to do just that.

Requirements:

This set up requires that both computers run Leopard. If you don’t have it yet, here’s the Amazon link to buy it. It is well worth the price. You also need two separate iChat supported IM accounts, one for each computer. This could be AIM, .Mac or Jabber accounts.

Step 1: Limit Users

It is very important this step is not skipped. Not limiting the users will open up to anyone taking over your computer.

From your Mac at home, launch iChat and from the top menu select iChat > Preferences and from the Accounts tab select your account from the Accounts list on the left panel.

From the Security tab, select Allow Specific People and add the username of the ichat account you would like to allow to auto-connect.

Step 2: Set Up Auto Accept Screen Sharing

From the Alerts tab in the ‘iChat > Preferences’, select Audio Invitation from the Event pull down menu. Then check-mark Run AppleScript and select Auto Accept.applescript from the pulldown menu. You can close the Preferences window now.

Now, we’ll need to edit the Auto Accept script we selected in the previous step. Click on the desktop to go to the Finder and from a new Finder window, navigate to ‘Your Hard Disk/Library/Scripts/iChat/’. This is the folder that contains the iChat AppleScripts provided by Apple in Leopard. Double click the file Auto Accept.applescript to open in AppleScript Utility.

A Screen Sharing invitation is sent to iChat as an Audio chat with a Screen Sharing flag. We will need to locate the audio invitation section and comment out the screen sharing if statement by enclosing the lines with (* and *). See example bellow. Additions are marked in red.


on received audio invitation theText from theBuddy for theChat
   (* if (screen sharing of theChat is none) then *)
    accept theChat
  (* end if *)
end received audio invitation


Save the document and quit AppleScript Utility.

Step 3: Set Home Computer To Stay Awake

Next, we need to set the home computer to stay stay awake, otherwise it will automatically go to sleep when not in use. From the top menu bar, select ‘Apple > System Preferences’ and click on the Energy Saver Preference Pane. From the Sleep tab, set the Computer sleep mode to never and check-mark the Put the hard disk to sleep option then quit System Preferences.

Step 4: Connect Remotely

Now we’re going to connect to our home Mac. From the other computer, add the username to the buddy list, select it and click the ‘Start Screen Sharing’ button on the bottom right of the buddy list window.

From the ‘Start Screen Sharing’ pull down menu, select ‘Ask to Share Username’s Screen…’ to begin the process.

iChat will ask permission on the Home account, but it will be automatically approved by our script there.

iChat will do it’s magic and your screen will shrink down to the corner as the remote Mac at home will go full screen.

Conclusion

I thought ‘Back to My Mac’ was going to be the .Mac feature that will make me renew my .Mac subscription, but the new iChat has proven more capable than the demo Steve made in his keynote.