You can spell check in Safari when posting in online forums, thanks to its Cocoa roots. Here's how:
Highlight what you wrote and Control-click on the highlighted text.
Select Spelling from the contextual menu and then Check Spelling from the submenu.
OS X's spell checker will kick in and check spelling for you. Control-click any underlined words and select the correct spelling from the results.
[robg adds: I find it highly ironic that this hint was submitted as "Youc an spell check..." :-). In any event, this is not really a Safari feature, it's a Cocoa feature, and it's available in any Cocoa application with an input box. It would be nice, though, if (like iChat) you could permanently enable "Check Spelling as you Type." There's a menu item for it (Edit -> Spelling), but you have to select it for each input box, every time!]
A quickie announcement before this morning's hints: Safari Beta 2 is now available!
Officially, beta2 adds (lifted from the above page): "... tabbed browsing, autofill forms & passwords, privacy 'reset,' import of Netscape and Mozilla bookmarks, increased standards compatibility, improved AppleScript support, and localized language support for English, Japanese, French and German."
As many of you may have realized by now, Safari has poor printing handling. Perhaps the worst bug is text clipping at the bottom of the page.
I have found a way of printing web pages nicely without too much hassle. From Safari, select File menu -> Save As... Save the document somewhere it will be quick to access. Then, drag the newly created Safari document onto TextEdit.
Once TextEdit opens the web page, you can print it from there and you'll have a perfect print, as long as TextEdit renders the HTML file (which may not always be the case until Apple unifies the HTML rendering library in Mac OS X with WebCore).
[robg adds: I don't do a lot of web printing, but I did notice a couple of glitches in Safari's output. I took a different route to the solution by dragging the URL to one of the other browsers. However, this won't work for pages (like most online store receipts) that are dynamically generated through your session, in which case, the above solution will work. I'm sure there are other workarounds, of course...]
Gnome, a software developer and macosxhints reader, created a technique to enable autofill in any browser using a simple online form. He originally posted a beta in this macosxhints' forums thread. This is such a valuable enhancement that I thought (with the developer's approval) it worth a hint. Here's the description of Pseudo Autofill:
This form will produce a bookmarklet (a special kind of bookmark) that adds an AutoFill button to any browser at all, like Safari 0.6.2, Camino and Netscape. Simply fill out the form below and drag the resulting link to your bookmarks bar, or for Safari follow the instructions below the link. The next time you come to a page with a form, click the bookmark and the form will be filled out for you. No personal data is sent to the eFritz staff--check the code if you don't believe us. JavaScript is required for this to work. Pseudo-AutoFill supports textfields, multiline textfields and pulldown boxes.
It works better than the original IE Autofill in my experience, in that it will work in any browser ... gasp, even those on Windows!
I can't take credit for this because I was told of its existence by Simon Fraser, a Camino (previously called Chimera) developer. There are hidden preferences in Camino that can be set via a special user.js preferences file. The file needs to be created in this path: ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> default -> random.slt, where random.slt is uniquely named for each user (for security reasons).
The user.js file can contain different settings for preference variables (thus over-riding prefs.js settings), as well as some other "hidden" settings. In my case, I wanted to recover the ability to download files with a save window that allows me to select a different directory each time. So I made a file called user.js in the noted directory, and put the following single line in it:
As far as I know, this one is not documented anywhere.
[robg adds: This hint is kind of the "parent hint" to a number of others concerning Chimera's hidden preferences; this search URL will return a list of 12 previous hints that mention some hidden Camino preference settings. The Camino "hidden preferences" page referenced above is a bit of a tease; they list three hidden settings and then basically tell you to go explore on your own ;-).]
I have to open RTF files every now and then, generally Read Me files for applications. But I don't like waiting for TextEdit to launch and then quitting it afterwards.
However, since I keep Safari open all the time, I have something much easier and quicker. Safari can read RTF files, so all I do is drag the file onto the Safari icon in the dock and it opens it right up, quickly and easily. It's much nicer than using TextEdit.
The only caveat is Safari can't read RTFD files, so if you have one of those you're stuck with TextEdit.
With Mozilla 1.3, they've changed the format of the .fileloc files for links to files on the local drives. In Mozilla 1.2.1 and earlier, local files were referenced with a format like:
file:///macintosh%20hd/Users/mcrocker/Documents/
Starting with Mozilla 1.3, the format has changed to only use two slashes, like:
file://macintosh%20hd/Users/mcrocker/Documents/
For those of you who don't know, a .fileloc file is created by dragging the tiny icon in the left of the URL text field in the Navigator window to the desktop or any Finder window. Then, to get back to that URL, just drag the .fileloc to the Navigator window. Some of us think that this is much better way to do things than with bookmarks because you can organize web pages using the standard file system rather than some sepparate entity like a bookmarks database. Unfortunately, the file names of .fileloc files is the URL, not the web page name, making these less useful than they would otherwise be.
Poor RealMedia plug-in support in the Camino browser finally forced me to look for an alternative way to listen to my favorite NPR programs. After very little research of the examples on Apple's AppleScript site, I decided to use the Safari browser and AppleScript to automate the process. What follows is an AppleScript that uses Safari and the RealOne player to play my two favorite programs from NPR. After I
finished, I decided that it might be of some use to others -- so here it is.
Please note this script depends upon the largely static nature of the web pages from which it builds the streaming media URLs. Any significant changes in these sites may result in this script breaking.
[robg adds: Read the rest of the article for the script; I have not tested it myself.]
In the same spirit as the recent An AppleScript to email Safari URLs with titles via Mail hint, I offer a similiar one but for PowerMail instead. It uses the wonderful Extra Suites background scripting application, from KANZU Utilites to position the focus of the newly-created email draft at the recipient email address field ready for addressing.
tell application "Safari"
set theURL to URL of front document
set theTitle to name of front window
end tell
tell application "PowerMail"
set theURL to "<" & theURL & ">" & return
set newMsg to make new message �
with properties {subject:theTitle, content:theURL}
open newMsg
activate
-- remove next 2 lines if Extra Suites
-- not available
delay 1
tell application "Extra Suites" to type key "tab" with shift
end tell
[robg adds: The need for this hint may be eliminated by the Safari/email JavaScript hint, which should open your default email application, but I don't have another email client to test that theory with ... and with this, we now have three separate hints on emailing from Safari, so I think the topic is sufficiently covered!]
Last week, a hint explained how to use AppleScript to email Safari URLs. Buried in the comments to that article is a gem of a tip with a different solution to the problem. Although this hint is clearly related to the first, it uses a completely different method, and I think it's worth running as a hint of its own. So here it is...
Full credit for this hint goes to amit_kr, who wrote:
I wanted the ability to do the same thing, and found a much simpler and convenient way. Drag this link (actually a javascript) to your bookmark bar; the content of the link is this line:
Call it whatever (say 'e'). Since this is a bookmark (and not a folder), a hotkey is assigned to it (command-1 to command-9) by Safari.
Now whenever you need to send the page title and URL to someone, just press the hot key, and that's it!! A mail message is created with the title of the page as the subject, the URL as the body, and the cursor active on the "To:" field.
So one could select a part of the webpage, press Command-C (to copy), Command-2 (to compose Mail with URL and title already there), type in the recipient's address, hit tab twice, press Command-V (to paste the selection), and hit send!
This has become my first-position bookmark, so I can email URLs with a quick Command-1.
