Posted by joe, Tue Sep 25 18:32:00 UTC 2007

Iconfactory's Twitterrific is my favorite way to update Twitter, and I learned two cool keyboard shortcuts today from Doug (Twitter: marchdoe).

One shortcoming of Twitter is having to spell people's usernames correctly. I often get ones directed to "jgrossberg", "joegrossberg", "joe", etc. (It's josephgrossberg, guys.)

I see these misspelled replies when I read through my friends' updates, but direct messages won't reach my inbox. Also, if one of their friends sees a message like "@jgrossberg: That is a cool link!", they won't find my account under jgrossberg.

Fortunately, Twitterrific's interface provides a simple way around this, through its keyboard shortcuts:

• Click on a particular person's update and press ⌘2 to reply to them. It will automatically insert the "@josephgrossberg" at the beginning of your message. (Why "2"? We think because that is the key that has the "@" symbol on it.)
• Similarly, doing ⌘D will help you send a direct message, by prepending a "d josephgrossberg".

Of course, I could have learned this by reading all the way down to the bottom of the Twitterrific web page ... but who wants to do that? ;)

Filed Under: Clients Tips & Tricks | Tags: direct message reply twitteriffic