Many people may not be aware that when visiting web pages that feature graphics, audio, and video, that much of this stuff ends up in an oddly-numbered file in your browser's cache folder. (You can find these folders in your user's Library/Caches folder.)
Today, I discovered that Leopard's Finder can now actually display much of this cached content in the Preview area of a Finder window (or via Quick Look), rather than just showing a generic document icon.
[robg adds: This works for cache files from Camino and Firefox, but not Safari -- Safari now stores its cache in a single .db file, instead of a number of independent files. Many cache files won't preview, but those with graphics, audio, or video seem to work fine.]
Here's a unique way to use Safari's web clip feature to create your own widget. I set up a countdown timer and generated the HTML, using this countdown generator. I then copied the HTML source, pasted it into TextEdit, added <html><head></head><body> at the top, and </body></html> at the bottom, and saved it to the Desktop as an HTML file.
Then I opened it in Safari, and used Web Clip to make my own widget from the output. Bingo -- a customised widget!
[robg adds: The theory here is more interesting than the actual example of a countdown widget, given the number of such widgets that are already available. Basically, grab an HTML snippet from a page that generates such things, add the basic HTML tags around it, then create a widget from the output.]
For .zem files, sometimes offered by Plone content management systems, to be treated as safe by Safari and similar applications, you may add three strings to your DownloadAssessment preferences file. Here's how:
Launch Terminal, and convert the plist into editable form:
When using Safari 3 in 10.4 or 10.5, you can select a URL from a source (Safari, TextEdit, another browser, whatever), and drag it to an empty space in Safari's tab bar. When you drop the URL, Safari will then open another tab with this URL.
[robg adds: If you drop the text in Safari's main window, instead of the tab bar, the URL will open in the current tab.]
When viewing a password-protected PDF from within Safari, or by selecting Open in Preview from Safari's Contextual Menu, the option to save the PDF doesn't exist, nor does the Print to PDF option exist within the Print Dialog box.
However, if you copy the PDF's URL, open the Downloads window (Command-Option-L within Safari) and then paste the URL, the PDF will start to download (i.e. be saved).
[robg adds: A comment on the queue site notes no copy is required; just drag the icon next to the URL into the Downloads window. Note that this hint doesn't defeat the password protection; it merely allows you to download the document.]
When Safari 3 is on a web page with multiple RSS Feeds, click on the RSS icon in the address bar to reveal all the different RSS feeds you can select. For example, go to the New York Times feed page and click on the RSS Icon in the address bar. Select your feed of choice from the drop-down menu.
[robg adds: This also works in Camino and Firefox, in 10.4 and 10.5; I'd never known that the RSS icon was clickable (shows you how often I use it!), so perhaps this will help others, too.]
Once you start using Leopard's data detectors in Apple Mail to add events to iCal and contacts to Address Book, it's natural to start craving data detectors in other apps.
Until Apple adds them to Safari, an easy workaround is to use Safari's Mail Contents of This Page (Command-I) menu item to send a web page to Mail. The data detectors don't work in an editing window, so just save and close the new message window. Select the message in your Drafts folder, and then start hovering over the contents in the lower pane of the Message Viewer.
A lot of people haved reported a problem with Firefox on Leopard, where Firefox was no longer displaying Cyrillic characters on buttons, in form input fields, tabs, and page titles. Instead, question marks appeared everywhere.
Here is a temporary fix ... quit Firefox, go to you Applications folder (or wherever you keep Firefox), Control-Click on the Firefox icon and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Go into Contents » Resources, and rename en.lproj to ru.lproj. Start Firefox, and everything should work like it did before Leopard.
Note: There is, however, one small side effect: Your main Firefox menu will appear in Russian, instead of English. All other menus and preference panes will still appear in English.
This fix will probably have to be re-applied after each Firefox update, if they don't fix this problem upstream.
It seems that OS X 10.5 has some really smart copy/paste going on between Safari and Mail. Today I copied the track listing from an album page in Amazon which had a ton of code around it to download the tracks, play previews etc...
When I pasted it in to mail, I expected to just get the text, which I would need to strip stuff out to look readable. Much to my surprise, the whole table from the web page pasted in with full functionality in Mail, and even gave me a Dashboard-like X in a circle in the upper left corner of the paste area to make it easy for me to delete.
When my brother received my message, he was able to preview the tracks in the preview pane of the message. He also informed me that some "
I don't know if you could do this in previous versions of Mac OS X, but it certainly works in Leopard (10.5) with Safari 3. If you're on a site that has a File Upload or Choose File button -- one that opens up a file browser to select a file -- you can simply drag a file from the Finder to the side of the button, and it will automatically be used as if you had navigated to it with the file browser and selected it.
This can save quite a lot of time if you have your files on your Desktop or the Finder window open in front of you.
[robg adds: This works in Safari 3 in 10.4, too. Note that this is not the old 'drag to open nav window' trick; just drag to the general area of the button, basically.]
Many people may not be aware that when visiting web pages that feature graphics, audio, and video, that much of this stuff ends up in an oddly-numbered file in your browser's cache folder. (You can find these folders in your user's Library/Caches folder.)
