Gain Access to Some Twitter Secrets

• July 26, 2011
• 3 notes
• #Tech
• #Twitter
• #Mac

Way back when the Mac world was still obsessing over Tweetie and we had heard word that Tweetie 2 was in development, MacHeist has promised its loyal customers that by buying their nanoBundle, they’d gain access to early beta access. 

A lot happened since then. Loren got snatched up by Twitter themselves and suddenly we were all using an actual Twitter for Mac application (that was completely free, I might add). But what about the MacHeisters? Well, a mysterious email went out a few weeks after the release and by entering a small key combination and your license code, you could unlock a new menu of “secret experimental preferences and options and promised access to pre-release builds of Twitter for Mac.” 

With the Mac App Store gaining credibility, popularity and applications by the thousands, Apple began to get wise to this backdoor and quickly put an end to it with the release of an update to Twitter’s Mac application. 

Back when the backdoor still worked, some clever Mac users had figured out a way to activate some of these special features using Terminal, but what about now? With a single Terminal command, you can activate the entire “Secret” menu and have access to some really cool features that’ll make your Twitter app even more amazing. 

Open up a new Terminal window and type (or better yet, copy and paste) the following:

defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac DebugMode -bool true

Restart your Twitter app and head on over to the preferences page. You’ll now see a new menu of some sweet options including bound scrolling, typing anywhere to start a new tweet, classic mode, and my favorite - custom quote styles. It might not sound like a big deal, but by customizing quoted tweet styles, you can once again easily use the old style RT that many of us still know and love. 

(Not sure where this workaround originated, but I first saw it here.)