Ahhh, Safari has build-in support for this with CMD-1...9!
Those are shortcuts to the first 9 bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar.

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/Marook

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Yes. And this has been around like - forever?

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this is not the sig you`re looking for.

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does it work from an iPhone ?

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There is the Bookmark Bar thing that has already been noted, but why not just knock out a little web page on your own machine? Granted the page would be machine specific.

I am always suspicious of "free" (as in no such thing) services. What is the payback for these guys? Why do they want my links on their site, using their $$$ and resources? There is a maxim in my field of psychology that says that sentient beings do things that are in their own best interest.

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I am always suspicious of "free" (as in no such thing) services. What is the payback for these guys? Why do they want my links on their site, using their $$$ and resources? There is a maxim in my field of psychology that says that sentient beings do things that are in their own best interest.

Generally, as with all social networking, it's about gathering marketing data. Even if they don't put ads of their own up, they are able to sell usage stats to interested parties. A rather large amount of demographic information can be had with a simple matching of "people who like site X also like site Y".

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From: Yarek T <*****@*****.co.uk>
Date: October 13, 2008 20:29:22 GMT-04:00
To: rgray <****@*****.ca>
Subject: Safari Dial

quote
There is the Bookmark Bar thing that has already been noted, but
why not just knock out a little web page on your own machine?
Granted the page would be machine specific.
I am always suspicious of "free" (as in no such thing) services.
What is the payback for these guys? Why do they want my links
on their site, using their $$$ and resources? There is a maxim in
my field of psychology that says that sentient beings do things
that are in their own best interest.
/quote

Doing this locally as a page is a great idea, unfortunately its quite
hard to do since there is no way to take screenshots reliably with
every browser. But its still possible, perhaps a little scripting
involved.

As for doing this for free, at the moment it is sort of my pet
project, originally started as my brothers idea (The poster of the
hint) but its slightly beefed up to handle more traffic. I don't deny
that i have thought about putting some adds on it, but at the
moment it will just spoil the simple look.

As for any security concerns, the idea is anonymity over plain
security, we don't store *anything* apart from the pin number
and urls.

(feel free to post this email & your reply on macosxhints as i don't
have an account there)

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Let's compare, shall we?

• Opera's Speed Dial
  Local to machine, easy to configure, secure
• Safari Dial
  Remote, awkward to configure, insecure
• Safari bookmark bar
  Local to machine, easy to configure, secure
• Custom home page
  Local to machine, awkward to configure, secure

Out of those, Opera's Speed Dial and Safari's bookmarks bar score equal.

Safari Dial is out, because it's completely insecure and awkward to configure.

Writing your own list of links in a custom home page is only slightly less accessible than Safari Dial, but a whole lot more secure. In fact, it was this approach that gave rise to bookmarks. Ever wondered why bookmarks were saved as a flat HTML file?

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Good run-down of Opera's Speed Dial copy-cats, but I'm sorry, it's not equal with Safari bookmarks bar.

Opera's Speed Dial has cool, graphical thumbnails that can be refreshed, that allow for modification via drag/drop, and are sync'd with Opera Link with your work computer or mobile phone using Opera (and has a web interface).
http://link.opera.com

(No add-ons, no workarounds, no instability, no memory leak, no de-install/re-install when the new version comes out. It just works great -- and CMD-1,9 shortcuts are assigned, as well.)

Opera just keeps innovating, and everyone else has been following for years, in the browser space. If you haven't tried the Mac version lately, v9.6 is impressive. (And, they've followed W3C standards to increase productivity of web developers, and not lock you in with a browser that has 5-year revision cycles.)

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Currently I click one button and all my sites come up in separate tabs. I find this method way more useful than Safari Dial. Perhaps eventually I'll fill Safari Dial with URLs of sites that don't get updated quite so often and that may be more useful.

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After using this site for a few days I have concluded that this site is almost totally useless. The problem is, once the thumbnail images are created, they never update, even with a screen refresh.

What you're left with is nothing more than a pretty bookmark page that can hold only nine items. Like I said: useless.

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