Exploring Safari 4

Always looking to the future we've decided to give Safari 4 a whirl to see what's around the corner.

The first thing that sticks out is the new 'Top Sites'. This is very much an overview page showing your most browsed sites. That might not be a good thing for some - but for us, we liked it.

This can be edited by clicking the 'edit' button at the bottom of the window.

This in turn reveals some controls for manipulating the results.

Personally I would like to see the ability to explicitly decide which pages I want (not necessarily my 'top sites').

Looking through your bookmarks now gives you to use the ability to search in cover-flow mode. It's useful for certain situations and annoying for others. It takes a little time to update all the thumbnails.

Search is improved and seems rapid from testing so far:

From early testing browser rendering actually seems very similar, more time will be required to determine if we see noticeable speed increases.

Verdict: Thumbs up!

Grabbing clean screenshots...

The ability to capture on the mac is really, really easy. Using 'Grab' or the key-combos to capture a screen/area has been thought about and implemented in an excellent way (the joy of working with OS X).

However, there are some nifty utilities out there that can assist even more. One of which is called 'paparazzi'. This little gem will allow you to specify a webpage, an image size and then when you set it to work will produce a lovely screen grab (minus the browser window etc.) for you to use. 

It's really simple and handy when you want to grab and archive/use pages from websites.

The only issue I have found so far is that it will not render any embedded flash in the page.  

Glims

I have been playing with Glims for Safari from machangout. This is a 'plugin' for safari that adds a whole host of useful features to increase your browsing pleasure and productivity.

Upon download and installation it adds an additional preference tab to the standard safari one where you can configure various options. Currently I'm running with the defaults.

Glims will add thumbnail images on your tabs (which change to an X on mouse over), and a useful max-window option from the safari window (very useful!).

The built in search window in safari gets SAYT (Search as you type) with icons, a handy feature.

Google (and yahoo) search results now also come with handy thumbnail previews which makes choosing the right page often much quicker.

Time will tell if this plugin continues to impress me (and maintains performance), but for now.... I love it.

Macs go full-screen

I stumbled upon this great little app from thebarbariangroup for the mac that enables you to use Safari in a 'presentation mode'.

Anyone out there that does design work and needs to show clients work (on their Mac!) will find this an excellent app to use. It's slick and simple. Well done guys.

Presentation for Mac