If you daily send a lot of links to your friends / Twitter followers it’s very likely that you’ve started using a URL shortener. It’s fast, easy and so web 2.0 to send a shortened URL, you can’t deny it. But as the url shortening mania exploded, so has the url shortening services: Tinyurl, Bit.ly, Tinyurl, Tr.im, Is.gd, J.mp, there are hundreds of shorteners out there.

Then, there’s the “your own URL shortener” trend: just as I did with mcstr.es, I purchased a short domain and installed lessn from Shaun Inman to generate short urls for MacStories links. Sure, lessn is not the only application which allows to acheive this (Yourls, for example, seems to be used by many people) but I like its interface and installation process more than others.

Now, if there’s one thing all these url shortening services miss it’s a desktop app to shorten links. I mean, an application that supports every service so that the users can choose which one to use.

For this reason I asked @andytuba (website) to build an Applescript for that.

And guess what, it’s awesome.

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Awesome tips from HawkWings about a Snow Leopard feature a very few users know: text substitution. You can actually enable text substitutions in Mac OS X by default instead of purchasing apps like TextEpander or Typinator. The problem is, not every Cocoa app supports them, so it’s very likely that you’ll end purchasing a third party app.

But anyway, if you’d like to enable them in Mail.app, it’s stupid simple.

If you ever wished to get the good, old reload button back in Safari 4, here’s a great tutorial from elasticthreads (you can reach him on Tumblr or Twitter) to acheive this.

I tried it and it works perfectly.

Enjoy!

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After Apple rolled out Snow Leopard 10.6.2 yesterday, many users started tweeting that the update broke all the Mail.app plugins they had installed.

Fortunately, I got Herald, Letterbox, QuoteFix and GrowlMail working.

Here’s how.

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Lightroom Blog Link

Seems like Lightroom is getting better and better.

Betalogue link

You just need to enter this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock show-expose-menus -bool no

After restarting the Dock (with killall Dock or with another utility), you will now have a Dock where clicking and holding on an application icon gives you the same menu as the one you get with control-clicking. And it’s instantaneous. Yey!

And just so you know, changing this setting does not disable the other feature, i.e. the “Minimize windows into application icon” feature. It still works. You just don’t have to deal with slow Exposé crap anymore.

Great tip aimed to those who can’t stand the new Exposè menu feature.

JustAnotheriPhoneBlog link

And no more Dutch hackers for you.

Applescript is one of those Mac OS features a few people master and many ignore. Truth be told, Apple has never published an “official” get-started guide to Applescript, so I understand all those users who just don’t get the point with it.

Anyway, Applescript is a human-language based code which enables users to perform actions. In case you’d like to know more about, take a look at my 25 Links to the Best AppleScripts Tutorials and Examples.

Today, I’d like to talk about this two neat applescripts I found here which let you easily convert your PDF files to .jpeg or .PNG formats.

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Dropbox is a great service: it allows users to keep everything (yes, everything) in sync between multiple devices. I daily use Dropbox in my workflow to backup my Yojimbo library and share stuff with my friends and co-workers, and I’m very satisfied. If you’re new to Dropbox, you can signup with this referrall link and, besides testing the service, you’ll make me earn 250 extra MB. (and I will thank you in one way or another)

Anyway, there are many creative yet less known uses for Dropbox. In this roundup I’ve collected the best I found around the web, but if you know more please share them in the comments!

Enjoy ;)

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