However, it has a fundamental flaw that no update or upgrade can fix; its user base is incredibly small. The problem is no one uses AIM anymore. All my contacts use Facebook Chat, or MSN, or Yahoo. There must be a way to condense all these protocols into the simple interface of iChat right?

Now you could go and download a third party app that lets you conference with these protocols; I’ve covered quite a few in a previous post, but what’s the fun in that? Today I’m going to discuss how how to connect iChat to quite a few of these different services.

Google Talk In iChat

This is going to be the simplest part of the tutorial. iChat has built in compatibility with Google Talk, so it’s ultra easy to add your account.

Step 1

Just open iChat from the applications folder, or even easier press CMD+Space Bar on your keyboard to open spotlight and then search ‘iChat’.

Open Up iChat Using Spotlight

Step 2

Once opened, ensure that your Mac’s focus is on iChat by clicking on it in the dock. This makes sure that its menus appear in the top left Menu Bar. If you already have an iChat account, you can ignore that for now. If you haven’t got any accounts set up on iChat already, you’ll see a ‘Welcome To iChat’ dialogue box appear. Just ignore that for now.

Click On The iChat Icon

Step 3

Next, go to the iChat preferences by click on iChat – Preferences… or press ⌘ + , on your keyboard. I recommend learning these keyboard shortcuts as they allow you to work a lot faster.

Go To iChat Preferences

Step 4

Once you’re in the ‘Accounts’ dialogue box. Click on the ‘Accounts’ pane and press the + sign in the bottom left.

Go To Accounts, Then +

Step 5

You’ll see an ‘Account Setup’ box appear. For the Account Type, select Google Talk. You’ll see others: Jabber, AIM, Mac.com. The first 3 are protocols the Mac uses by default. The other two are protocols run by third parties. We’ll come to the others later on.

Enter your account info, click ‘Done’ and guess what? You’re done. (if you don’t have a Google Talk Account, you can create one here)

Press ⌘ + Q to quit iChat, then start it back up from spotlight like you did earlier.

A contact list should now appear displaying all of your online Google Talk contacts. Get chatting!

Just Select Google Talk And Enter Your Info

Next up, chatting to your Facebook friends right from iChat.

Facebook Chat In iChat

Google Talk in iChat is novel, but now we’re getting into some more complex business. Be prepared to use a little more of your initiative for this one.

Step 1

Before even opening iChat, you need to head to http://facebook.com/editaccount.php. Log into Facebook then go to your account settings by clicking on the link given. Make sure you have your username set to something memorable.

Set Your Username

Step 2

Next you need to open the account preferences for iChat again and add a new account. Just follow Steps 1 through to 4 on the first tutorial.

Once in, you need to set a a few parameters. Don’t let the strange words like ‘Port’, and ‘Kerberos v5′ or ‘SSL’ daunt you.

Account Type: Jabber

Account Name: Your-Facebook-Username@chat.facebook.com

Password: Your-Facebook-Password

And for the server options…

Server: chat.facebook.com

Port: 5222

Make sure that none of the tick boxes are ticked (that’s ‘Use SSL’ and ‘Use Kerberos v5 for authentication’).

Input Your Details

Quit iChat by pressing ⌘+Q, then start it up again and the contact list will appear ready for you to start chatting.

(This lesson requires a reasonable knowledge of Chinese)

Type any pinyin, English word or Chinese character in and you’ll be presented with translations, stroke orders and even example sentences the phrase could be used in. Let’s try one…

Here we go, gongyixue (工艺学). Okay, so how can we use our newly found character? Better find out ‘>more‘.

Brilliant; we’re half way towards making a Chinese blog about technology and nciku has done all the work for us!

Buuuut wait…

Picture this, you’re writing your technology blog for the Chinese technology enthusiast. You know what 工艺学 means and you even now know that ‘diannao’ means computer in Chinese. Thing is, you don’t want to open up nciku then start copying and pasting every single time you want to write a character. Here’s where a little Mac magic comes in handy.

Go ahead and open up System Preferences; head to the Language & Text section and, while your at it, go to ‘Input Sources’.

You’ll now be able to see all the languages you can change to using your keyboard. For example, change all the positions of the keys of your British keyboard into the keys of a French keyboard, Bulgarian to French, Canadian to Belgian, any keyboard to any keyboard… You can even choose Dvorak (which we’ll talk about in a later article). For now, take baby steps and just choose ‘Chinese – Simplified’. This will automatically tick the box saying ‘Pinyin – Simplified’, and is exactly what you will need for writing in Chinese on your Mac.

Now just make sure the check box ‘Show Input menu in menu bar’ is checked and you can now open up Pages, Microsoft Word, your Email, your blogger blog.. whatever you may wish to use for writing in Chinese (bare in mind that this does not work for virtual machines).

In your menu bar at the top right of your screen you’ll now see a flag representing your current keyboard language. Click on the flag and you’ll get a list of the other keyboard inputs you selected earlier. Just click on Pinyin – Simplified.

And that is pretty much it; start typing pinyin and you’ll get the characters that match up to that pinyin. Just use your number keys or your arrow keys while pressing the space bar to select the correct one. Your only job left to do now is learn all that pinyin!

This is my upcoming design for a Lego engine I’ve been contemplating for a while, dubbed ‘The Beast’.

In its current stage, a working model has been fully constructed. However, at this moment I am working out a few hitches and design improvements I would like to make to increase its functionality.

I’ll have a video up for you guys by next year at the latest. My apologies for the recent lack of posts, as I have been focusing my time on completing this model so far.

First up, heres my advice to you, use iChat if you can.It runs beautifully on the Mac, looks beautiful on the Mac and just fits in. If this really isn’t an option, e.g. if your in a position such as mine where everyone uses Windows Live Messenger, then the solutions are going to be a lil’ bit uglier.

So lets take a look at Microsoft’s Port of Windows Live Messenger to Mac, dubbed Messenger for Mac.

Messenger for Mac

So have a look at that… yeah… now keep that image in your head while you click the link to read on.

Windows Live Messenger

Now look at this one. Remember the last image? See any similarities? Good because I don’t either. Consistency doesn’t seem to be a big deal over at Microsoft, and you can certainly tell that when you compare the two Messengers together. In fact, the only similarity that I can spot in the two versions is the fact that they actually both have a login screen. Now this would be okay if Messenger for Mac looked good, but in my personal opinion, compared to Adium it just doesn’t.

Even the feature list is different in the Mac version, in favor of Windows Live Messenger. In Messenger for Mac, you can send messages to people, send files, use custom emoticons, set your personal message as your currently playing iTunes song and… well that’s about it. Now let’s be all negative and look at what it can’t do-

• Offline Messages
• Handwritten messages
• Screen sharing
• Nudges
• Winks
• Photo backgrounds on current conversation windows
• Games that can be played with another contact
• Some built-in emoticons, including the rabbit emoticon
• Contact details such as Addresses
• Integration with Windows Live Spaces
• Windows Live Today
• Color schemes
• Audio and Video chat for Personal accounts (this will be featured later in the 8.x series)
• Emoticons viewable on messenger nicks

(referenced from Wikipedia.org)

Quite a big list isn’t it? So by now it’s pretty obvious that Messenger for Mac isn’t the best solution for messaging using the MSN network. So lets take a look at the competitors. First up, Mercury.

Mercury Contact List

Mercury Messenger has pretty much got all of the ‘useful’ features of Windows Live Messenger, plus a few other goodies. These include Custom Emoticons, Offline Instant Messaging, Winks, Nudges and Voice Clips, all of which are features that Messenger for Mac doesn’t have. In addition, I think the actual application is not a complete eye sore, excluding the logo, and Mercury also includes multiple skins. Furthermore, Mercury has a few features that you can’t even get on Windows Live Messenger, without installing Msg Plus! Live, such as Tabbed Chatting, Growl Support (lets you view notifications), add-ons, multiple connections at once and even Messenger Plus! Live colours.

The only draw back I can find about Mercury is also an advantage. It is written in Java. This means it has various ports over various operating systems but with the disadvantage of requiring a lot of CPU power and memory in certain situations. Secondly, we come to Adium…

Adium Contact List

Adium is lacking in features on the MSN IM Network, such as webcam, voice messages, custom emoticons etc., but what it does have going for it is that its completely native to Mac, meaning good performance, and its completely customizable. There are hundreds of skins you can use on Adium to make it match the style of your Mac and blend in perfectly, unlike Mercury which has rudimentary skins and Messenger for Mac which you can’t do anything to whatsoever. I’ve noticed a few crashes with Adium, but ultimately these can be overlooked and are sure to be ironed out in future releases.

If you simply cannot live without the fully fledged Windows Live Messenger, you can always use virtualization software (such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion) but I would use this as a last resort as it’s expensive and slows down your workflow because it uses a lot of system resources.

To conclude, choose Mercury if you require features, Adium for speed and appearance and Messenger for Mac if your crazy.

I use the top sites feature a lot, not because it’s particularly useful but just mainly because its there. It never occurred to me that all those realtime webpage previews could be taking up a lot of disk space and precious RAM! Here’s a possible fix, which may or may not work for you, depending on the actual cause of the slowness (e.g. you may just not have enough RAM).

1. Close down Safari completely by using the CMD+Q keyboard shortcut or via the dock (it’s a good idea to paste these instructions somewhere first.)
2. Open up a Finder window (if you didn’t know already this can easily be brought up by click on the desktop and using the keyboard shortcut CMD+N)
3. Head over to your home area and go into the Library folder located there (e.g. Macintosh HD→Users→Matt).
4. Next, navigate to Caches → com.apple.Safari →Webpage Previews
5. Now in this folder your going to notice a lot of files, a lot of webpages and ultimately a lot of wasted disk space (for me it was 575MB). Go ahead and select all these files and delete them.
6. Restart Safari, open up a few tabs and see if this has worked.

You Mac Pro owners out there might not notice a differences, but I imagine with a machine without a good spec, this could be an answer. When you usually empty the cache using the ‘Empty Cache’ menu item, the Top Sites images do not get deleted and end up costing you a lot of speed. Hopefully this will issue be resolved in a later version of Safari, I’m using Safari version 4.0.2, for reference.

I’ll leave you guys with a nice little image which was stored in my top sites cache folder.

Sensible Advice

Now if you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 or your using a Mac and missing this feature, do not worry, as there are solutions for both to make your Desktop pretty again (and no it’s not Deskscapes which is just a rip off). Video and tutorials after the break…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vista showin’ off all its fancy stuff there eh? So lets start with us Mac users, what we gonna do?

Well there’s this little app I’ve found called Wallsaver. Despite a recommendation against Wallsaver, I have found this application to give the best results. There is a catch though, but I’m sure you’ll overlook this when faced with the prettiness it brings to your desktop.

So go and head over to WallSaverApp.com. When you visit the homepage you might be thinking…

“Well hang on… this sets a screen saver as your desktop background not a video!”

Well a screen saver is a video. It’s an animated image which, for the most part, is rendered in realtime. Mac OSX comes preloaded with some gorgeous screen savers and you can even download more from the web. Who wouldn’t want to exploit that?

Wallsaver Application

So lets get back to business, get wall saver download and installed onto your system and go ahead and open her up. If your a bit eager, go ahead and click activate now. This should turn the desktop backgrounds of all your monitors to the default screen saver. Once your done drooling at the screen, your probably thinking to yourself…

“Duuude, I want this thang as my background all the time!”

Account Preferences

That you should, and it’s a pretty simple thing to do to. First of all, click on the Preferences tab of Wallsaver and check all the the tick boxes, and while your there choose your screen saver. Next, go into your system preferences and click on ‘Accounts’. From here click on ‘Logic Items’, add Wallsaver by click on the plus icon and finding it in your applications folder and add it on in.

Finding Wallsaver

This will ensure that Wallsaver is opened up and changes your background automatically every time you start up your Mac.

Wallsaver In Action

Well what about you Windows 7 users? Where did dreamscene go!? Well MyDigitalLife.info has a nice tutorial on how to use DreamScene on Windows 7, regardless of the version you have. What’s the best thing about these apps I hear you ask? They’re completely free. I mean… you could use DeskScapes but… Stardock just suck, right?

But what about us Mac users eh? Well it used to be easy (or at least easier)…but now it’s just a pain in the —-! Basically, you go download one of three programs, GimmeSomeTune, Skeiron or Tune Lyrics (or Harmonic but that’s a dashboard widget). Now all of these three automatically find and add the lyrics from the internet for the song your currently playing. Now if you want to add the lyrics to your entire library, that’s a bit more time consuming.

For this, you’ll have to play every single song in your library. Now this isn’t too bad if you have a small library… but what if your like me with over 1600 songs? That would take me 277.7 days to get through! That’s almost a year! Most of us naturally don’t want to wait or leave our computers on for that long, so after the break I’ll give you guys the solution… and the problem with that solution

Now the most obvious solution is to only play each song in your library for only several seconds (enough time for the application to find and add the lyrics but not too much as to waste your time). For this were going to need an apple script. This apple script is call Needle Drop.

Shuffle and repeat settings.

Before you do anything else, open up iTunes+your desired application for adding the lyrics/album art and do one of two things. Firstly, of all make or select a pre-made playlist with all the songs you want the lyrics/album art to be added to. Secondly, ensure that your repeat setting is set to playlist once and your shuffle setting is turned off.

Launching the Needle Drop script.

Once you’ve installed Needle Drop go ahead and do what I do in the screen shot; click on the Apple Scripts menu item and then click on Needle Drop. This will bring up a small input dialog box.

Needle Drop dialog box 1.

I recommend about 10 seconds for each track which will easily give the application enough time to find the lyrics or album art. Then click ‘Ok’. The next dialog box you can leave at 0. After you click ‘Ok’ the songs in the playlist you selected will start playing for the amount of time specified.

GimmeSomeTune found lyrics.

I’m using GimmeSomeTune and it works fine for a few songs but unfortunately not for the more popular ones (and ironically not for Michael Jackson’s song ‘They Don’t Care About Us’). Instead, saying…

“Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics).”

Licensing restrictions on lyrics.

This problem occurs on all the automatic lyric finding applications on the Mac (hence the “Please note: this is not the fault of the developer….” blablabla). I haven’t even been able to find a mention of this problem anywhere on the internet and the only solution I can offer at the moment is to share your music library with a Windows machine and use iArt or just add lyrics manually. I’ll keep you guys updated if any other solutions come about.

Ah, so I bet you’re thinking now, ‘Wow, another boring post on another boring blog in a sea of 185.62 million other blogs…’. And for the most part, your right. That figure’s made up of 72.82 million Chinese blogs (which, unless your Chinese, probably doesn’t mean anything to you) and, arguably the more important proportion for the few who stumbled upon this post, 112.8 million blogs in other countries.

Now, how do I differentiate my first post on my blog from the millions of others which start with the sentence…

“Hi, this is my new blog. I hope for many more posts in the future. Please keep reading.”

Well the fact is, I’ve just done it.

Now by this point your thinking…

“Okay smart guy, you made a good first post, now what is the blog even about!?”

Well… this blogs about everything I thinks cool…

“Can’t you be more specific?”

No.

“Please?”

Oh fine, you’ve convinced me. This blogs going to be mostly about my geeky strange obsession with technology, but I’m going to make it in such a way that it will help you.

As an example, let’s take Chris Pirillo. If you haven’t heard of him 1. your no geek 2. I’m happy for you. You could pretty much call him an internet celeb. This is a guy who’s being monitored by thousands of internet users, via webcam, over the net. Problem is, he goes on a lot about ‘Social Networking’, the effects of it and how he thinks communicating over the internet will play a big roll in the future. Now that’s all fine, I suppose you could even call it dandy, but when he’s making another boring video+blog post about this stuff every other week that’s when it becomes a problem.

How am I going to tackle this problem? By making most (comon’ some of life’s best things are pointless) of my posts (and videos, if your wondering) have a point to them. But it would be unfair to say a guy who has one of the biggest technology blogs on the net is doing it all wrong, because obviously he isn’t! But there are a few things that I think he could improve on.

So I’ll shut up about me now and say this, you’ll be able to read everyone one of my blog posts and learn something new and useful afterwards.

Did I do a good job? Hope so, keep reading guys!

“Woooooah this blog is just so awesome, I’m gonna visit it every freakin’ day!”