I recently finished my latest ebook, Take Control of Safari 5. Of course, “finished” is a relative term – it goes to an editor or two, and comes back with comments. And it’s a good thing there was a delay of a week or two between when I finished and when it was finished, because in that time period I discovered a trick – totally by accident – that fixed a problem I had given a red Warning! notice to in the penultimate version.
Here’s the setup: you have a window open with a bunch of tabs in it. You have a button on your bookmarks bar that automatically opens its folder contents into tabs (or, you Command-click on a folder name in the bookmarks bar, which opens the contents into tabs instead of opening the menu). The new tabs are not added to the window – they take over the window, replacing the current set of tabs.
So, in the almost-published version of Take Control of Safari 5 (there’s that link again, in case you weren’t moved to click on it the first time), I warned readers to be very careful about using the Open in Tabs option because you can’t undo it.
Well, Command-Z doesn’t undo it, but there’s something even better. A click in the Back button in the toolbar replaces all the new tabs with all the old tabs! Then, a click in the Forward button replaces the old ones with the new ones again. And so on.
Then I had one of those “Aha!” moments – one of the ones that just don’t pan out. Because I thought, “Hey, if I check the Back or Forward menu [press instead of click the button], maybe all the tabs from the other set will be listed so I could select just one.” Instead, you get a single-command menu that (sort of) describes what the Back button’s going to do.
