InputMenu
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TUAW Tip: a shortcut to the Character Palette
I'm not the world's most patriotic Englishman, and I'm also not keen on allowing icons to fill up my Mac's menu bar unless strictly necessary. That's why I don't let the Input Menu flag hog space up there; one of the first things I do on a fresh Mac system is remove it (by unchecking the "Show input menu in menu bar" box in the Input Menu tab of the International preferences pane). That said, there are occasions when I wish I had quick access to the Character Palette - which can normally only be reached via the Input Menu. Grrr. Which is why I dug around online to find a script that would call up the Character Palette for me, and saved it as an application, and Bob's your uncle. Now I can get to the Character Palette, via Spotlight, by typing "Command+Space CHAR return". Excellent. You can get the script from this page on Mac OS X Hints. Click the "Get this script" thingy and it will open in Script Editor. Click Compile, then Run, just to check it does what you want - then Save As... an app, or a script if you prefer.
Mac 101: Input Menu and keyboard layouts
OS X has a lot of nice features for "International" users that many folks forget are there, even though some of them are handy for US English users as well. Among these are the many available keyboard layouts in the Input Menu tab of the International System Preference Pane. The Input Menu is designed primarily to give you access to foreign language keyboard layouts which remap your Roman character keys to specialized glyph sets in both Roman and non-Roman languages (e.g. Cyrillic and Asian languages, etc.). In addition to the non-English language support, however, there are other useful things such as support for the Dvorak keyboard layout. Perhaps best of all, by checking the "Show input menu in menu bar" option (see the image after the jump) you get one click access to whichever language layouts you select in the Preference Pane, as well as the Character Palette (for finding obscure symbols and glyphs) and the Keyboard Viewer (which will place a clickable keyboard on your screen). This will place a small flag in your menu bar which will indicate which key layout is active, and when you click on it you'll be able to select from among the available key layouts selected in the Input Menu tab. If you ever have to write in a foreign language using an appropriate key layout can save a lot of time for tying special characters like macra in Latin and breathings and accents in Greek. And if you want to get a little bit adventurous you can even make custom key layouts of your own.
