Actually, there's a much easier way to use the fadas on Mac OS X. I do this with the French accent marks, and it works for Gaelic, too. All you have to do is go to the "edit" drop down menu in safari or text edit (the Mac's built-in word processing program) and select "special characters". It allows you to build a menu of favorites from all of the special characters from all of the menus available to you. The Gaelic accents are in the menu labelled "Accented Latin letters". All you have to do to select the accented letters needed for proper Gaelic spelling is to go to that letter, then click the button that looks like a gear at the bottom left hand corner of the box, which will give you the option to add that letter to your favorites list. Click it, and that will add that character, and its accent mark, to your list of favorites. Continue to compile your list of favorites until you have all of the necessary Irish letters with the fadas. Then, just click the button called "favorites" in the bar at the top of the "special characters" section, and it will show all of the letters you've selected as favorites. Then, before you're going to type a message in Gaelic, just pull down the "special characters" menu, and make sure that you're selected "favorites". The box will stay open on your desktop while you type stuff, so you can just go to it any time that you need to type a letter with a fada. Select the letter you want, then just click the "insert" button, and the letter will be wherever you want. The box won't go away just because you've clicked on it, so it will stay as long as you want, and you can use as many fadas as you need, & this way is much easier. I'm also going to post a message about how to use the fadas on your Blackberry, because I've just figured out how to do that, and I thought people here might like to know that. None of this stuff is as complicated as it seems, and you don't need a special app on your Blackberry to get either the French or Irish accent marks. My next post will tell you how to use both of them easily without any special apps.