SafariStand - Add many useful features to Safari
Jan 04, '06 07:42:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]
This week's pick is a bit odd in that ... I'm not even sure I can tell you everything it does. The developer is Japanese, and the product is "mostly" translated into English. What that means is that the documentation is somewhat sparse, and some features may be hard to understand. With that said, however, SafariStand is an amazingly useful plug-in. SafariStand adds a Stand menu to Safari, and through that, you have access to a ton of interesting features, including:
- Separators (both lines and labels) in the Bookmarks menu, as seen in this screenshot.
- Add a sidebar showing icon views of presently-opened sites, ala OmniWeb.
- Add a New Tab button to the Bookmarks bar.
- Display a floating window with bookmarks, history, and even a page viewer and RSS reader.
- Use a 'shelf' to store collections of tabs in an easy-to-access manner. This is tricky to describe, but basically, you open a bunch of sites in tabs, then use the 'Create Shelf from Current Workspace' menu item to put those tabs into a shelf entry. From now on, you can open all those sites via the shelf. This is a great way to temporarily store visited sites, and to re-open them in tabs in a hurry.
- Use keywords in the URL bar to do quick searches -- typing mu screenshot into the URL area, for instance, will search MacUpdate for entries that match "screenshot." You can add your own search shortcuts as well.
- Let ordinary keystrokes do useful things. If you're not in the URL bar or the search field, Safari ignores your typing. SafariStand lets you assign a few useful keys to often-used tasks: the +, - and = keys on the 10-key, for instance, can be used to increase, decrease, and reset the text size and/or image scaling for a web page. And (very useful), you can use , and . to select the previous or next tab.
- Supports 'site alteration,' which is a way of customizing what happens when you visit certain sites. For instance, for cnn.com, you can disable plug-ins, meaning those annoying flash ads won't be displayed. In addition, you have control over images, JavaScript, pop-up windows, Java, page encoding, default and minimum font sizes, and user agent. You can even specify your own style sheet to be used, on a site by site basis.
- Auto-close the Safari Downloads window automatically, after a user-settable period of time. Hooray! I hate the fact that that window opens every time I start a download!
- Colorize HTML in the View Source mode.
There's more, but those are the main things I found interesting. As noted, the interface and documentation can be a bit daunting, but I found it well worth the learning curve. I especially appreciate the control over individual sites. My bank's site, for instance, requires pop-up windows to be active, so I had been manually enabling and disabling the pop-up blocker in Safari. Now I have a custom setting for their page that allows the pop-ups. Very nice.
So far, I haven't had any crashes or other issues, but note that this is (a) technically beta software, and (b) something that extensively modifies Safari's behavior. As with most things in this category, having a current backup is a Very Good Idea.
Comments (29)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060104074227247