UsingMac.com
Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users
Daily Trick 32. Safari 4.0.3 Won't Launch
After installing the latest Safari 4.0.3 via Software Update, my Mac suddenly refuses to open new window of Safari. The possible cause of this problem is the plugins that have been installed on your Safari.
The first possible fix is by uninstalling Glims. To do this, you can go to MacHangout FAQ to download Glims Uninstaller.
If Safari is still not working after the installation, you can check on several possible and delete some possible clashing plugins:
- Mac HD → Library → InputManagers: /Library/InputManagers
- Mac HD → Library → Input Methods: /Library/Input Methods
- Home → Library → Input Methods: ~/Library/Input Methods
- Mac HD → Library → Application Support: /Library/Application Support
Note that you can just: open Finder, hit Cmd-Shift-G, and copy-paste the address written above for quick directory jump.
I have managed to make my Safari working fine now. Hope that you can get your Safari working again too.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Safari
Daily Trick 9. Glims for Safari
Many have tried to tweak Safari, including me. Initially, I'm really satisfied with the tweaking process. But now, not really. What's the reason behind?
After browsing around the web, I found this little cocoa application for Safari called Glims. Glims empowers our Safari with many additional tools, such as Full Screen View, Search Engine Thumbnails, Tabs Re-open from Last Sessions, Bookmarks Separator and other gorgeous features.
You can click on the thumbnail for viewing larger screenshot.
Believe me, you should try installing this application. It's just a minute away, which is much faster and more gorgeous compared to tweaking by yourselves.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Safari
Daily Tricks 4. Eternal History
After using Safari for quite some time, it will be normal for us to have visit many sites and pages. All of those are tracked and saved in our history.
Perhaps after a year or more, we will forget some of useful sites and want to find it. At that time, we can use our history to trackback.
If you are using Firefox as web browser, you can have your eternal history by following these steps:
- Open Firefox and go to its Preferences
- Under Preferences Pane, choose Privacy Section
- Take a look at the first check box labelled "Keep my history for at least … days". You can fill any large numbers here, e.g. 99999.
- And your history files will remain there for that written days, practically eternal
On the other hand, if you want to make your history only lasts for 1 day, you can simply change the number to 1.
For Safari, the setting is under Safari Menubar → Preferences → General Section.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Safari
Safari 4 Beta. New Features and Tweaks
I feel impressed on many new features of Safari 4 and I believe you feel the same. However, some of the features are not essential for us and may even break our usual workflow. This creates the urge to disable some of the features.
In this article, we will discuss with you new features of Safari 4, as well as Terminal command lines that can be used to disable these new features.
Search Specific Mac Sites with Google
Besides helping Internet users to search for useful information online, Google also provides search for specific Mac sites to assist Mac users in gathering more Mac related information.
As far as I know, there are two ways to perform search on specific Mac sites.
Adding Prefix to Search Keyword
By prefixing 'Mac' to your keyword search, there is a high chance to get returned results related to Mac. For example, to search for useful Mac keyboard shortcuts, you can use this search keyword: 'Mac Keyboard Shortcut'.
Searching with Google for Mac
To narrow down your scope on Mac specific sites, you can always use Google for Mac. Inside this page, you will see the search button labeled as 'Search Mac Sites' instead of usual 'Google Search'.
However, I believe some of us may want to incorporate this Mac specific search with Safari search box. The rest of this article will explain this.
8 Essences of Power Browsing with Safari
Obviously, we want to have the best user experience while using this web browser and for sure, there should be some hidden features inside. That's why I'm here, exposing you to several remarkable findings on Safari web browser. And these findings will become your basic guide on using Safari web browser, if you are new to the world of Mac.
You could expect to find something new here, trust me.
Porn Mode in Safari
Finally, I've found the evidence! Private Browsing in Safari is Porn Mode in disguise. Now, I know why people choose to use Safari.
Are you curious how to have this Safari? You little perv…
25 Useful Shortcuts for Safari
In most applications, there will be a bunch of shortcuts to help you boost your productivity. Especially in Mac, you will see more shortcuts than when you used Windows, it's just because Mac users are meant to be more productive and used less hand-mouse movement.
Some of the shortcuts, however, are not usually used, some are even not widely known. Today, I'd like to compile some of the useful shortcuts for Safari that you will probably use in the future, including the less-known but highly useful ones.
Download Media Files with Least Effort
More and more stuffs of people interest flowing around the web, people are starting to seek and download those stuffs. However, most of the time the permalink to the storage place are unavailable, especially for media files.
Instead of wasting time searching from Google, smashing the web or even begging the creator of the file, it'll take the least of your effort by using the following tricks which perfectly work on Safari (such as downloading YouTube Video for free) and Firefox.
Safari Web Browser
-
Open Activity Window
In order to open activity window, you can use the paths Safari: Window ▸ Activity (keystrokes: Command-Option-A). -
Recognizing the File
You will see a whole bunch of files displayed inside the pane. Hopefully, movie files stand out of the crowd as those kind of files usually appear in big file size. -
Cast the Magic
So, the file you want to download has been spotted. Use this trick: Option-DoubleClick on the file name. The file will be downloaded and put into your Downloads folder.
You don't need to rename the file you've just downloaded. Right after the downloading process is finished, the file is ready to be used.
It's quite different for Firefox…
Using Safari Browser Bookmark
Safari is the default web browser for Mac. Because of not only its speed performance but also its constant stability, it has become favourite web browser for Mac users, standing as high as Firefox browser.
In Safari, as well as other web browsers, you can find built-in bookmark service to help you surf the web and take your surfing result as reference easily. Today, I'm going to share you some of the tricks in using Safari browser bookmark.
Let's get started by familiarizing with two kinds of Safari browser bookmark.
Safari Bookmarks Bar and Bookmarks Menu
Bookmarks Bar is located just above your browser tabs. Bookmarks that are placed in this bookmarks bar are meant to be accessed quickly as future reference. I usually put my recent bookmarks on the bookmarks bar first before moving them to my bookmarks menu.
Tip: There is an easy-to-remember shortcut to access to bookmarks stored in bookmarks bar: Command-1, Command-2, Command-3, etc. These shortcuts are automatically assigned according to the order of your bookmarks from left hand side of the browser (exclude bookmarks folder).
Change Safari Default Search Engine
Nowadays, we depend on search engine to get information from around the web. I myself depend very much on search engine. Currently, Safari is using Google as its default search engine.
But here comes the issue, a setting will never satisfy the mind of several millions people surfing the web. Some of us maybe want to use Google UK as our default search engine, some maybe prefer using Yahoo!
With Inquisitor 3 installed on your Safari, you will be able to change your Safari default search engine easily.
Here are the steps you need to do :
- Download Inquisitor and follow the installation instruction
- After you've finished installing Inquisitor, relaunch your Safari for the change to take effect
- Go to Safari ▸ Preferences
- Click on Search section to modify settings for Inquisitor
- In the last option box, you should be able to choose your default search engine
Take Screenshot of Entire Webpage
There are times when you want to take screenshot of webpages, but obviously you can't use simple print screen which can only take part of the webpage as big as your screen display. So what should you do to capture the whole webpage?
Saft Safari Plugin
Recently, I've found this nice Safari plugin called Saft, which is a Shareware. Saft gives you ability to have a screenshot of entire webpage and save it as a PDF file with a single click.
Quick Way to Set Image as Desktop Picture
There is a bunch of ways to set an image as your Desktop picture, such as using Quicksilver or using Automator.
Recently, I've found another quick way to do that. Do you want to know what's that?
Bookmarklets for Mac Safari
Above: Safari splitted by two. Done with bookmarklet.
There is a way to quickly run short script in your Safari web browser; It's by using bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are bookmark items and bookmark items are not limited to only url address; We can also make short javascript function as bookmark item by simply dropping the favicon to bookmark bar.
Free Download YouTube Video with Safari
Most of us like to watch YouTube, right? (Hope so). And it's surprisingly simple and easy to download those YouTube videos. Do you want to know? Follow next three steps.
Impressive Safari Plugins
Safari has been optimized for Mac and because of that, it becomes the best browser for running on Mac. However, with Firefox empowered by plenty of plugins, it's confusing to determine which one to choose: Safari or Firefox?
After searching around the web, I found several impressive plugins for Safari, such as del.icio.us bookmark, StumbleUpon toolbar, Tab Exposé, Greasemonkey script customizer, and many others. Interested?
Safari - Exporting Bookmarks into HTML File
There are 2 ways to export Safari Bookmarks plist file into HTML file, the first one is the geeky way and the other is using third party application. Let's see how it can be done.
The Geeky Way
Open your Terminal and execute this command line, which will add Debug menu to Safari :
Safari and Firefox - Quick Google Search
Usually, what will you do when you want to start new search with Google search bar on the top-right corner of your web browser? There are three ways to do that.
Type 1. Google Homepage
This is the least advanced way. However, most of my friends still use this way. First, you open new tab (keystrokes : Command-T), followed by typing in the url address "www.google.com", filling in the search term and Google will return you the result.
The advantage of using this way is that you can see Google homepage which in special occasion, the logo is changed.
Safari - Easy Private Browsing Toggling
It's quite surprising that when I open my MacBook today, I saw a globe instead of Apple logo. Anyone knows why?
Safari Private Browsing
Ok. Let's talk about Private Browsing of Safari. We all know that with private browsing, whatever we browse won't come out at the History section of our Safari browser. It's quite a nice feature that Safari has.
Open All Safari Bookmarks with a Click
Since the update to Leopard, I've become Safari addict because it not only accelerates faster than other browsers but also provides handy way to manage bookmarks and easy way of accessing them back.
Actually, I was used to be questioning myself how to open all my bookmarks in one category faster. I'd discovered the way, i.e. by clicking on Open in Tabs.
Safari Trick : Dragging Tab
Import Tabs from Other Browsers
When I made a visit to MacTips, I stumbled upon the article entitled Drag Tabs Between 2 Browsers. To my disappointment, after some trials, I still cannot drag my Safari tab into other browsers but I succeed to do it oppositely from other browsers to Safari.
Organizing Safari Bookmarks
Since I've upgraded to Leopard, I've eventually migrated from Firefox, which is rich of ad-ons, to Safari, which has been proved to render the page much faster.
In addition to that, I also like Safari Bookmark that is easy to create, manage and organize.
Adding Bookmark Items
Adding bookmark items comes in handy when you're using Safari. Maybe you've been wondering what is the function of the globe next to the url address, and now you will have the answer : it's for dragging the url into bookmark bar and hence in return, you will have new bookmark item. It's easy right?
Trick :
If you happen to invoke your Safari Bookmarks Preferences Pane, you will see the blue globe as the icon. If you want, you can change this icon which can be easily found with these simple steps :
- Applications ▸ Safari
- Contextual Menu ▸ Show Package Contents
- Contents ▸ Resources
- BookmarkPreferences.tiff
Leopard and Safari
There are several things that can make you consider using Safari as your Leopard web browser. Let's take a look at them.
Ultimate Safari Webclip
Webclip is newly released tool for Safari. With Webclip, you can pick portion of your favorite web pages as an new Dashboard widget. Webclip is located next to the reload button.