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My favorite Safari 5 extensions

On June 7, 2010, Apple released Safari 5, the latest version of their web browser. In addition to performance increases, better HTML5 support, and Safari Reader (which I wrote about earlier), Safari 5 also offers support for extensions. Extensions allow third-party developers to add new features and functionality to Safari in an Apple-approved method that doesn’t require hacks. (Other browsers, e.g., Firefox and Chrome, have had similar functionality for awhile.)

Since Safari’s release, dozens of extensions have been released that add features ranging from ad blocking to Facebook modifications to browser tab management. Some are humorous, while some tackle significant and serious issues. Below is a list of my favorite Safari 5 extensions, the ones that I never knew I needed until they came out.

  • Beautifier - Beautifier adds extra text-smoothing to websites using the “-webkit-font-smoothing” CSS property. Your mileage may vary, though: overall, the “beautified” text looks nice but the extra smoothing can make smaller text a little too light and thin.
  • Defacer - Defacer hides the Facebook “Like” buttons and links that are on websites everywhere these days.
  • Facebook Zen - This extension removes some of the Facebook-related clutter that is so prevalent on the web these days. For example, it disables the list of ads and suggestions that appear in the right column on your Facebook page.
  • HelvetiReader - A port of script previously developed by Hicksdesign (see the original), HelvetiReader turns Google Reader’s interface into something more streamlined and minimal—and Helvetica-centric.
  • JavaScript Blacklist - This extension lets you block JavaScript that is hosted on other sites. This is great for doing away with annoying scripts such as those from Tynt, Intellitxt and Snap. No more copy-and-paste hijinks or pop-up website previews, huzzah!
  • Oldschoogle - Oldschoogle allows you to disable to left and right columns that Google added to search results. I’ve disabled the right column, which means no more ads.
  • Shortly - Adds a button to your toolbar that, when clicked, will automatically shorten URLs for usage in Twitter, e-mail, etc. YouTube URLs will be shortened using “youtu.be”, Flickr URLs will be shortened using “flic.kr”, and all other URLs will be shortened with “bit.ly” or “goo.gl”.
  • View Background Image - Adds an item to your contextual menu that displays the background image of any element in a new browser tab.

New extensions are being added all the time to the Safari Extensions blog (Apple’s official extensions gallery will open later this summer). Here are a few that I hope to see added in the near future:

  • Faviconize - The FaviconizeTab extension for Firefox seems trivial until you actually use it. If you’re one of those users that has lots of tabs open, being able to collapse those tabs to display just the favicon—and thereby freeing up space in the browser window (for more tabs)—is quite nice.
  • HelvetiMail - HelvetiMail is currently availabe to Safari only if you have Greasekit and SIMBL installed. It’d be really nice to see it reborn as a native Safari extension, if only so that my Gmail and Google Reader screens match.
  • Web Developer—According to this random tweet, the incredibly useful Web Developer extension will be making its way to Safari (a Chrome version was recently released). If you’re a web developer, this extension is a must-have, giving you a Swiss Army knife-like array of functions that can aid in development, testing, and debugging.
  • Coda Notes - Panic announced this extension shortly after Safari 5’s release, but it’s not yet available. Coda Notes lets you annotate, mark up, and draw on the website that you’re currently looking at, and then e-mail a screenshot with your annotations. Not only could this prove really useful as a communications tool between developers and clients, but given that this is Panic we’re talking about, I’m sure it’s going to look and function great.

Am I missing any extensions? What extensions do you find useful, and which ones would you like to see developed?


Safari 5’s “Reader” and the death of web publishing

Safari 5 Reader

In all of the hullabaloo surrounding Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4, it was easy to miss the announcement of Safari 5, the latest version of Apple’s web browser. And it was even easier to overlook the announcement of one of Safari 5’s features. But now that Safari 5 has been in the wild for a bit, this particular feature has been getting more and more attention, and I think there’s more to come as people work through its potential ramifications.

The feature in question is “Safari Reader”, which allows you to view a streamlined version of a website’s news articles and blog entries. Or, as Apple puts it:

Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story. It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you’re on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the article—whether two or twenty. Onscreen controls let you email, print, and zoom. Change the size of the text, and Safari remembers it the next time you view an article in Safari Reader.

Most users will probably consider this a very welcome feature, especially in light of the fact that web advertising has consistently grown more obnoxious over time, thanks to obtrusive techniques and gimmicks such as fly-out ads (which lurk in a webpage’s corner and “fly out” when you mouse over them), “in-text” advertising (which highlights certain words on a webpage and displays a popup with ads when you mouse over those words), and splitting articles across multiple pages (which increases the number of ad impressions for the entire article). Safari Reader provides a nice escape from these things and gives you quick and easy access to nothing but the content that you came to the website for in the first place.

(Admittedly, this isn’t anything new. Readability is an add-on for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that does much the same thing. Ad blocking software has been around for a long time. And many sites offer their content ad-free, or relatively ad-free, in their RSS feeds. But as far as I know, this is the first time it’s been a browser-level feature.)

Continue reading…


Apple’s HTML5 Showcase

Apple has launched a nice little gallery that showcases some of the cool things that can be done with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. No Flash required, though you do need to be using a modern browser (e.g., the latest version of Safari). The demos are pretty cool—I’m especially fond of the “Transitions” gallery—and it just proves that Flash is becoming increasingly unnecessary to create rich, interactive web experiences.


Commodore 64 for iPhone

We all know that the iPhone is already the pinnacle of geek lust, but now it has a nice, healthy dollop of retro geek lust as well.

And just for the record, this is way cooler than the recent announcement of an actual Commodore 64 incarnation that’s coming this June.


John Gruber on Apple’s Tablet

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame offers up some intriguing and thoughtful punditry on Apple’s much-rumored Tablet device.

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design. What size is it? There’s a big difference between, say, 7- and 10-inch displays. How do you type on it? With all your fingers, like a laptop keyboard? Or like an iPhone, with only your thumbs? If you’re supposed to watch video on it, how do you prop it up? Holding it in your hands? Flat on a table seems like the wrong angle entirely; but a fold-out “arm” to prop it up, à la a picture frame, seems clumsy and inelegant. If it’s just a touchscreen tablet, how do you protect the screen while carrying it around? If it folds up somehow, how is it not just a laptop - why not put a hardware keyboard on the part that folds up to cover the display? (Everyone I know at Apple refers to it as “The Tablet”, but so far as I can tell, that’s because that’s what everyone calls it, not because anyone knows that it actually even is, physically, a tablet. And “The Tablet” most certainly is not the product name.) If it’s too big to fit in a pants pocket, how are you supposed to carry it around? And but if it does fit in a pants pocket, how is it bigger enough than an iPod Touch to justify existing? And so on.

But there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

This article is a good example of why I like Gruber’s writing so much.


Safari 4, DigitalColor Meter, hex values, and hidden characters

Shortly after upgrading to Safari 4, the latest version of Apple’s web browser, I took a look at a site that I’ve been working on and noticed that the layout was off. The site looked fine for the most part, but some elements—specifically some navigational links—had been left unstyled by the site’s style sheet.

Normally, style sheet info is an “all or nothing” deal. Either your style sheet works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, it’s usually because of something simple, like the style sheet’s URL being incorrectly specified. But that obviously wasn’t the case here, because part of the style sheet was working.

Furthermore, the site looked perfectly fine in Firefox, and I couldn’t remember the site ever having this issue in Safari 3. So obviously, my thoughts turned to Safari 4 as the culprit. I immediately began dreading the hours spent trawling through discussion forums and mailing lists to try and learn if style sheets were being handled differently in Safari 4. All manner of worst case scenarios were tumbling around in my imagination when, in a moment of clarity, I decided to validate my style sheet.

Sure enough, the style sheet had a few errors. Most of them were fairly straightforward, like improper values being specified for an attribute. But one error stood out to me: one of the hex color values was invalid because it contained hidden characters.

That’s when it dawned on me. When making my (X)HTML/CSS mockups, I often use of DigitalColor Meter, an OS X utility that shows you the color value of any pixel on the screen. It’s a very handy utility for web developers because it lets you get a color from your layout without having to load a mockup in Photoshop just so you can use Photoshop’s Eyedropper tool. Instead, you fire up DigitalColor Meter, hover over the area containing the color you need, press Command-Shift-C, go to your HTML editor, press Command-V, and presto—you’ve got your hex value.

It’s a pretty slick shortcut, but I’d forgotten that—for whatever reason—hidden characters are inserted into the hex value when you paste it into your HTML editor. Take a look at this screenshot taken of a recently pasted hex value in BBEdit with the “Show Invisibles” option turned on.

As you can see, there are additional characters after the “96”, “C2”, and “51”. I usually remember to remove such characters, but in this instance, I had missed one. Other browsers ignored the hidden character when they loaded the style sheet but Safari 4 choked on it; when it loaded the style sheet, any info after the hidden character was simply ignored. (I’ll let the reader decide if this is a good thing or not. But personally, I tend to think that it is a good thing when a web browser forces me to make sure that my code is neat and tidy.)

So for today’s lesson, repeat after me: Always validate your style sheet(s) and if you’re using DigitalColor Meter, make sure you clean out any hidden characters if/when you paste hex values from it into your HTML editor.


The Panic Three-Day Sale

Panic—one of the coolest Mac developers out there, and the creators of Transmit (my favorite Mac FTP client) and Coda—is selling their biggest apps for half-price until May 29th. Click here for details.


Senuti

Earlier this month, my external hard drive—which contained, among other things, my entire iTunes library—died. I tried rescuing what I could when it became obvious that the drive was on its last legs, but I was unable to rescue everything, including my iTunes library.

Fortunately, a lot of the songs in my library also existed on my iPod. By default, however, you can’t copy music files from an iPod to your computer. A quick Google search turned up plenty of methods for getting around this limitation, and I finally chose to go with Senuti.

Senuti says that it’s a simple application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer. And to put it simply, it worked like a charm. There were some features, such as transferring playlists over, that I didn’t use. However, the core functionality worked just fine, and was quite easy to do, to boot.

I still have some work to do with rebuilding my iTunes library, but I’m much better off than before, thanks to Senuti. (You can find a more thorough review over on AppScount.)


Apple gets Cinematic

Yeah, the new MacBook and MacBook Pro are pretty cool, what with the souped up graphics, solid aluminum construction, and other nifty features.

But what really got me drooling is the new 24” LED Cinema Display. My immediate thoughts were somewhere along the lines of “I wonder how this would look sitting next to my iMac?” But apparently, it’s only for MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro systems with Mini DisplayPort, according to the specs page.

It’s not enough to make me want to get rid of my desktop, but it’s still awfully purty.


In The Wild

OS X Leopard Desktop

The official release of Mac OS X 10.5 (aka “Leopard”) is still two days away, but reviews have begun appearing throughout the InterTubes over the last day or so. Some of them are official, others not so much, but the overall response has been pretty positive, if not euphoric.

  • “Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard First Impressions”: Despite Apple’s efforts to restrict seeding to select individuals, it appears that the final build of Leopard has made its way outside of Apple. One individual who has claimed to have installed the final version of Leopard on their iMac posted his experience.
  • “Apple Offers New Goodies in Leopard System”: Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots—and most of them are bright ones.
  • “Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista”: Leopard isn’t a must-have for current Mac owners, but it adds a lot of value. For new Mac buyers, it makes switching even more attractive.
  • “Apple OS X Leopard: A beautiful upgrade”: Leopard is a legitimately big deal. It’s underhyped compared to iPhone, and yet unlike iPhone, Leopard is a genuine triumph of customer-focused engineering. It’s a pleasure and a relief to see that Apple remembers how to deliver open, affordable, standards-based products.

Personally, I’ll probably be upgrading to 10.4.11 before making the jump to Leopard. As much as I love Apple, I prefer to let the early adopters work out the kinks and glitches. Once those have been patched via an update or two, then I’ll drop the $129 (and maybe even more, so I can get an external hard drive to use with Time Machine).