A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Adium is a great Mac application for all things IM, but one misfeature it's had for years is an overbusy dock icon that looks and acts like it was designed by The Penguin. Unlike some of my friends, I'm not bothered by the fact that it's a cartoon duck, but I have always been tweaked that by default it announces new messages by making a quacking sound, bouncing, flapping its wings, and continuously flashing the username of the entity who sent you the message.

This carries on until you click it to shut it up, and since I use Growl to pop up new IMs in temporary and unobtrusive little bubbles while I work on other things, the duck's insistence that I click it so it can show me chat messages that I've already read has grown tiresome.

In past versions of Adium I haven't been able to shut the duck up completely, but with its newest release (1.0.5), I have achieved the optimum level of ducky politeness.

1. In the "Events" tab of the preferences window, change the overall sound set to "iChat" (for much less aggravating noises) and set the reaction to the "Message received (Background chat)" event to "Display a Growl notification" only, removing the username dock display.


2. Change "Message received" to "Play the sound 'Received Message'" only, removing the dock-bounce effect.


3. Under the same window's "Advanced" tab, uncheck the "Animated dock icon" box, leaving "Display a message count badge" checked, because that's fine.

I consider this setup ideal. I am much happier with this now.

http://theminiblog.co.uk/archives/2006/11/16/how-to-cleaning-the-apple-keyboard/

I'm totally doing this this weekend. After three years, my keyboard is really quite disgusting. I'm embarrassed to let other people use it.