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:

 javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href)

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.

We are trying to design a website and noticed the bold tags (<b>) don't seem to be working in Safari (Internet Explorer is fine). We also noticed that other sites do seem to use bold in Safari, though.

After a little digging, I found that to use bold tags in Safari, you must specify a font face that supports bold. Look in Safari's Preferences, Appearance Tab. Click the Select button next to the font and notice that the default Geneva font doesn't support the bold typeface.

So when developing webpages that use bold, either specify a different font or make sure you change the default font in your preferences.

[robg adds: I'm publishing this hint in the hopes that someone can confirm it. In my limited testing, it didn't seem to cause problems when I specified Geneva on a simple test page, but a friend experienced just what was described here - no bold text until he switched to a font face that supported bold. Can anyone confirm (or even expand!) on this potential problem?]

I've been trying to use Mail/Safari rather than Mozilla. One of the (many) things I miss is the ability to select "send link" when viewing a page, to have a new message created with the page title as the subject and the URL as the body. (I know Mail service has a "send selection" but that's not quite what I want). AppleScript and the AppleScript Menu to the rescue!

tell application "Safari"
  ignoring case
    set theURL to URL of front document
    set theSource to source of front document
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "title>"
    set theSource to second text item of theSource
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "</"
    set theTitle to first text item of theSource
  end ignoring
end tell

tell application "Mail"
  set accountAddresses to (email addresses of first account)
  set fromAddress to first item of accountAddresses
  set theMessage to make new outgoing message
  set visible of theMessage to true
  set subject of theMessage to theTitle
  set content of theMessage to theURL
  activate
end tell

[robg adds: Save this script as a compiled script in your user's Library -> Scripts folder, and then just activate it using the ScriptMenu icon when you need it. Very handy! As an aside, activate the ScriptMenu by double-clicking ScriptMenu.menu in the Applications -> AppleScript folder.]

NPR has switched from publishing RealAudio streams as .ram files to .smil files. Unfortunately, the Safari web browser appears to truncate that suffix to just .smi, which tells Mac OS that the file is a Self Mounting Image file. The system attempts to mount the bogus image on the Desktop and fails, never opening the file in the RealOne Player as intended. The first file downloaded will have the name "dmg.smi". Subsequent files are named "dmg-1.smi", "dmg-2.smi", and so on.

This script watches for files with names like that to appear in your Safari Download folder. When one does appear, the script alerts you and lets you choose whether to open it in RealOne Player or ignore it and do nothing. You can disable the confirmation dialog box by changing the value of the "request_confirmation" property to "false".

If you're a better AppleScripter than I am, and you almost certainly are, please add comments to this hint and/or send any improvements to me at pheelb at yahoo dot com. I hope this improves your NPR listening!

[robg adds: I have not tested this script, but there's no potentially dangerous code involved.]

The following hint was emailed to me by macosxhints reader close2me, and I found it interesting enough to write up and post with additional detail.

Want to get more sites on your Safari bookmark bar? Or are you more of an icon than a text person? Consider replacing the names of some of your bookmarks with icons, as seen in the screenshot.

From the left, I have my Google Related button, the Apple home page, and then my News folder. How do you use icons instead of names? It's actually quite easy.

Start by enabling the character palette, as described in this hint. Once enabled, activate the palette and then set the "View" drop-down to "All."

In Safari, bring up the Bookmarks page and edit the name of one of your bookmarks -- select all the text and hit Delete so you have a blank name field. Switch back to the character palette and find an icon that you like (check in Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Technical, and Dingbats for some good ones). Click once to select it, and then hit the Insert button. You should see your chosen symbol inserted into the bookmark name field in Safari. That's all there is to it! You can also add spaces to improve the spacing of your newly condensed bookmarks bar.

This hint, of course, should also work on any other browser that will accept input from the Character Palette (which should cover any native browser).

[Site news aside: I ran out of time this morning, hence the low hint count...]

In Safari, you can highlight text using traditional click-drag selection method. But there is one more way of highlighting text in Safari! Instead of a single-click to begin the highlighting, use a double-click, hold, then drag. As you drag on, Safari will highlight by word, not by a single character proximate to the cursor.

This makes selecting much easier and more accurate (assuming that you want to select words in their entirety).

[robg adds: This is actually a standard feature of Cocoa, and should work in any Cocoa application such as Mail and TextEdit. We have run a couple of other hints about Cocoa's text editing features (1, 2) if you'd like to read more about them.]

I'm not sure if this is new to all you people but I've never read it anywhere before. If you're looking at a Flash web page you can right-click (control-click) the screen and you have options to zoom in and out. You can almost zoom right to one pixel. I've only tested this with Safari and Chimera.

[robg adds: This is a standard feature of Flash, and there are other useful menu options in the contextual menu (such as the quality setting and a print button) ... the contextual menu can be especially useful if you're trying to cheat at mini-putt, but who would want to do that, just to score an 18 for 18 holes? ;-)]

In Sarafi, highlight an URL, NOT a hyperlink but a URL in plain text. Control-click or right-click on the highlighted URL. The contextual menu lists three commands: "Go to Address," "Copy," and "Google Search."

"Go to Address" is the cool one. It saves a couple of steps (copying the URL, pasting the URL, and pressing Enter/Return) to go to another page/site. My testing has been limited, but to help Safari figure it out, highlight a plain text URL that contains the "http://" protocol prefix.

Highlight the following URL/plain-text (in Safari) and see for yourself: http://www.apple.com

[robg adds: Now that's handy!]

I was just mucking around in Safari and discovered something that I didn't expect - though perhaps I should have.

I was deleting all of the Apple-supplied bookmarks in the toolbar. I started then to edit the name of one of my links, and messed up. So I pressed Command-Z and it fixed it. I pressed it again, and it started to add bookmarks back into the toolbar that I had deleted! Not sure how useful this is, but thought I would share it with others.

I like the Google search bar in Safari, but I when I think of a Google search, I want it to actually open a new window. I have been using Command-shift click to open links behind my window for later viewing, so I tried holding these keys down and hitting return from the Google search bar. Sure enough, it opened the Google search in a window behind my current one.

[robg adds: We've run a hint on the Safari keyboard shortcuts before, but nowhere do they mention that the shortcuts work from the Google search entry area!]