http://safariextensions.org/

http://safariextensions.tumblr.com/

http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/extensions/

http://www.pimpmysafari.com/category/extensions

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.

You should understand the available Find/Replace procedures so you can put my complaints in context:

• The new search field in the toolbar, à la Safari or the Finder. Command-F activates it, so it’s a simple matter to hit Command-F, type your search term, and get results – and, as in Safari and the Finder, you don’t even have to press Return to get the search going; it starts searching while you’re still typing.

• The Find and Replace sidebar. The nice touch about Word 2011’s new approach to searches is that you have the option to have the hits listed in the sidebar, a multi-function area that can also display: the document map that’s been available for Word several versions now; the page thumbnails, as in 2008; revisions on a tracked document (I love that); and all the hits for a search term, similar to Preview’s sidebar display (I can love that, too). It’s a great overview of all the hits so you can scan them in context and then click on the one you want to jump to.

The top of the sidebar has a Find and Replace area with Find and Replace fields, a short list of commands (“Ignore Case”, for instance) in an Action menu, and Find, Replace, and Replace All buttons.

• The Find and Replace dialog. The old Find and Replace dialog. And do I mean old! Hasn’t changed a whit since Word 2004, and maybe before that. Really? In all that time, no one at Microsoft could see how to improve this dialog? No one? Seriously?!)

1. No feedback when something’s selected

The new search field is not a Bad Thing. In fact, it can be handy for basic searches, and, matched with the new approach of displaying hits in the sidebar, it has great promise. It is, however, poorly implemented.

Hit Command-F to activate it, type your search term, and matches in your document are highlighted. Works like a charm – unless you have something selected in the document.

In previous versions of Word, a search would be done starting within the selection and then you’d be asked if you want to continue the search beyond it; but with the search field… nothing happens. Unless you count a brief flash of the selection highlight as something, in which case I’ll amend that statement to “nothing useful happens”—and you only get that if you happen to press Return while the field’s active. You get no search results, nor even the courtesy of a dialog letting you know what’s going on – or, in this case, what’s not going on.

[This “selection first, then ask if the search should be continued” feature still works when the Find and Replace dialog is open.]

2. Three steps to get to the full Find/Replace dialog

I need the Find/Replace dialog. The full one that lets me set such search parameters as looking for highlighted text, or something in a certain paragraph style, or just so I can specify searching up from the current point instead of down.

How do I get there? Say I start with Command-F to activate the search field and type bookmarks bar and then realize I want to limit the search to Heading 1 styles. Next I choose Replace from the search field menu, which opens the sidebar (or press Command-Shift-H to open it). THEN I have to choose Advanced Find & Replace from the Action menu.

So, that’s three steps just to open the damn dialog, never mind that you still have to open another dialog if you want to specify character formats, or character or paragraph styles, as search criteria.

[Okay, I’m making another entry just to describe how to reassign the Command-Shift-H back to opening the “Advanced” dialog, the way it used to.]

Top, the search field in the toolbar. Bottom, the sidebar Find and Replace

3. No tabbing from one field to another in the sidebar search

At the top of the sidebar is a Find and Replace area, which presents several problems. The first you’ll run across is this: You can’t tab between the Find and the Replace fields. Open this area with either the Replace command from the search field menu (see picture) or the Edit > Find > Replace command (Command-Shift-H) and the Find field is filled in to match the toolbar’s search field, and the Replace field is active. Want to alter the Find field? You’ll have to click in it to activate it. Did you hit Tab to try to move to the Find field? Sorry, now the Replace field is inactive, too, and you’ll have to click in that to enter or edit anything. This is ridiculous.

But it gets worse: hit Tab (because that’s the natural thing to do) and nothing happens. Keep hitting it; nothing happens. Nothing blinks, beeps, or otherwise lets you know that at least Word heard you, even if it won’t do anything for you. It feels as if the program has frozen, though it hasn’t – but you must click somewhere in the window (or the sidebar or the search field) to get Word’s attention.

4. The Replace field is always active when you open the sidebar

Type search text in the search field in the toolbar, open the search sidebar, and the Replace field is active, on the seemingly reasonable assumption that since you’ve already put something in the search field, you probably now need to put something in the Replace field.

But if you open the sidebar because you know you want to toggle the Whole Word Only or Ignore Case option from its Action menu, you’re likely to hit Command-Shift-H to open the sidebar before you type anything at all. But the Replace field is still active by default—even though you may not want to Replace anything, but only want to find stuff to review. And, as noted above, you can’t tab to the other field. So, you’re stuck clicking in the search field to activate it.

Would it be so hard to detect an empty search field when the Find/Replace sidebar is opened, and activate the search field instead??

5. Multiple windows and the dead search field

Open Find and Replace in the sidebar. Hit Tab because Replace is active, and you want to put something in Find. As noted above, everything seems to go dead. Switch to another window with the systemwide Command-~ shortcut – because that’s a simple test to see if a program is still working if you have more than one window open. Yep, it’s still working, so Command-~ again to go back to the first window.

And now the search field in the toolbar is entirely dead. The usually white typing area is almost as gray as the toolbar itself and the document doesn’t respond to any keyboard input. Hey, how about Esc? Nope, not even that. Only a click someplace in the window raises it from the dead.

6. Multiple windows, the dead search field and window swapping

Okay, so you happened to follow the “procedure” I just described, and you’re back at the window where you started, and it has a dead, gray search field. Esc didn’t work to fix the field, but it’s so obvious that there’s a problem with the field, you figure hitting Command-F again might activate it, as it does initially.

Of course! That makes perfect sense. Or it would in another program. But this is Microsoft Word, so if you press Command-F at this point it brings the other window forward and activates its search field!

7. Inconsistent basic terminology

And, while we’re at it: how about some consistent terminology? As I typed up these issues, sometimes I found myself referring to the search field, sometimes the Find field, for the same thing (or the same three things: in the toolbar, in the sidebar, and in the Find and Replace dialog.)

That’s because the gray text that identifies the otherwise empty search field in the toolbar is Search in Document. So, it’s a search field. Open the sidebar, and the empty field’s gray text is Search Document. Okay, that’s relatively the same thing. But the sidebar area is labeled Find and Replace, not Search and Replace. Open the full dialog, where the search field has a label rather than gray text inside it, and the label is Find what. The tab-button that let’s you do a simple find as opposed to a Find/Replace is Find. The Edit menu command is are Find.

[To be fair - although I don’t find myself much in the mood for it as I catalog these issues - this is an endemic problem, and you’ll find this inconsistency of terms in many programs.]

8. Ignore Case vs. Match Case

The default approach to searches is case insensitive: type in “jersey” and you’ll get hits for the fabric and also for the state. When you want one or the other, you type your search term using the correct capitalization and specify that the search should match it. In the traditional Find and Replace dialog, this was always accomplished by checking the Match Case button.

In order to provide this oft-used option without your having to drill down to the third level of the Find function (see #2), Word 2011 puts a scant handful of options in the action menu in the Find and Replace sidebar (“Sounds Like”?? Really? Is that the one they think people use so often it gets pride of place when there are only four slots available??). Now, where was I… oh, yes… so, is the traditional dialog’s Match Case option in the more-easily-accessed sidebar? No. Yes. Sort of maybe.

There’s an Ignore Case option. Does it give you the same “power”? Yes. But how? BY GIVING YOU THE OPPOSITE CHOICE. Want to search for “jersey” and not get instances of New Jersey? UNCHECK the Ignore Case option in the sidebar. Or CHECK the Match Case option in the dialog. Consistent much?

This is so typical of Microsoft: give the user all sorts of capabilities, but don’t worry about how or where. It doesn’t matter if you have to drill through multiple dialogs or awkward menus, or if a command description makes little sense, or if it’s esthetically lacking. Just make sure it’s in the feature list. I keep expecting more from the Mac unit of Microsoft, that the sensibilities of the Mac’s interface will overcome the tunnel vision of the people doing the designing and coding. Maybe they’re not allowed to actually use Macs, so they just don’t get it.

(Hey, look at the bottom of the Find/Replace dialog: have you ever seen pop-up menus whose names are so close to their left edges? These practically poke me in the eye. It’s not as if there’s not enough room in the dialog, or in the menus as they’re currently designed. Did you know that Apple publishes interface guidelines that specifies the exact number of pixels that should be used for the placement and spacing of items in dialogs? No? Maybe Microsoft doesn’t know, either.)

I mean, really - they can't nudge these words to the right a bit??

I certainly don’t do this every time I install an extension – most extensions are in and then out after a brief testing period. But for those that stay in, when I want to do anything with them – change options, or disable them temporarily while I test a similar one, or delete them after all – it’s sooo much easier if they’re listed alphabetically so I don’t have to scroll up and down in the list to find them. So, every so often, I take five minutes to get them organized again. Here’s how:

1. Quit Safari.

2. Open the folder that holds the extension files: ~/Library/Safari/Extensions. That squiggle stands for your Home folder. (Copy that pathname from here, go to the Finder, choose Go > Go To Folder, paste the pathname in and press Return.)

3. Create a subfolder inside this folder – I’ll call it Subfolder. Put all your extensions inside it. The quick way: Press Command-A to select everything, and Command-click on the Subfolder and then on the Extensions.plist file to deselect them; drag the remaining selected items into the Subfolder.

4. Open the Subfolder, sort its contents by name – and then proceed with re-installing one extension at a time by double-click on them in order.

This reinstall-in-alphabetical-order procedure would be quite elegant if it weren’t for two time-wasting glitches. If you select all the items in the folder and choose File > Open, they won’t be installed in alphabetical order anyway. I have no idea how the Finder decides what it’s going to launch first from a multiple selection, but it sure isn’t according to the order you’ve chosen for the window! So, you have to double-click on the extensions one at a time in the list.

The second glitch: you’ll get a dialog, and sometimes two, for each and every extension that you opened, the same as you did when you first installed them. There’s the main “Are you sure you want to install…” confirmation dialog, which (and rightly so) has Don’t Install as the default button – but here it’s a major annoyance since you have to specifically move to and click the button rather than just hit Return to perform. For extensions that you downloaded from a developer’s site rather than through Apple’s Extensions Gallery, there’s an extra dialog that shows up prior to the Install confirmation: “… is an application downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” Again, you have to mouse to the Open button because in this dialog, there’s no default button at all. And, just as an extra annoyance, the dialogs don’t line up so that you can click Open in this dialog and then Install in the next. To top it off, you have to move back and forth between Safari and the Finder window – which doesn’t seem like much until you have to do it a dozen or more times in a row. (Make the Safari window small to get it out of the way so you can reach the Finder window more easily. Close the Safari window? No, that would be too easy – each time you add an extension, a default Safari window opens if there’s no extant window.)

A mild saving grace here is that when you install an extension, the extension file itself moves from its current location into the Extensions folder, so your Subfolder will gradually empty and you’ll always know which ones still need to be installed.

As annoying as this procedure is, I find it saves me time in the long run, over having to scroll up and down in the list in the Extensions preference pane every time I’m looking for a specific extension’s information.

Start with the Edit > New Smart Folder command. (If you start with the standard Find command, you can still save it as a smart folder.) Set the search to This Mac; it doesn’t matter if you leave Contents or File Name selected in the Search bar, because the criteria you’ll be entering will specify what you need.

Add a criteria bar by clicking on the Add button in the Search bar. Set the first menu to Kind, and choose Other from the second menu. In the text field, type word document. That’s the first trick. A file’s Kind is what you see in the Kind column in a Finder window. Word documents are variously Microsoft Word document (for Word 2008 and 2001) or Microsoft Word 97 – 2004 document. You don’t have to type all the words of a file’s Kind, nor do multiple words have to be contiguous (and caps don’t matter). Just word would grab both those file Kinds – but they’d also grab files whose kinds are Microsoft Word settings and Microsoft Word template. So, by specifying word document as the Kind, the search finds only the files that have both those words in their Kind descriptions.

The next thing I have in the picture below is a straightforward criteria for a time span, which you can add or not as you see fit. Add a criteria bar by clicking on the Add button in the current bar, choose Last Modified Date from the first menu, Within Last from the second menu, and Months (or whatever) from the third menu, entering the number of months (or whatever) you want to encompass.

Now comes the tricky part – not tricky as in difficult, but tricky as in… well, Tricky Dicky comes to mind, but that not only dates me but also has bad connotations. The problem with the construct so far is that it will find auto-recovery files (what Word saves in case of crashes so you won’t have to do quite so much reconstruction if you hadn’t saved recently) and Word Work files (temporary background files that don’t get erased on quitting if Word crashes instead of letting you quit). Their file types are the same as those for standard Word documents, but their names are easy to identify: AutoRecovery save of MyImportantDocument and Word Work File A_2878199, for instance.

So, you have to indicate that you don’t want any documents whose names include AutoRecovery or Word Work. Which brings us to my favorite Spotlight search technique: Boolean, or logical, operators. These are simply ways of indicating things like: I want this AND also this; I want this but NOT that; I want this OR this as long as it’s NOT also that OR that either. Spotlight translates the AND, OR, and NOT of logical operators into items that are put under headings of All (for AND), Any (for ALL), and None (for NOT). Wait! Don’t leave – really, it’s not difficult.

The first step for this part of the procedure is to access those headings, and you do it by pressing the Option key: you’ll see the Add button in the criteria bars change from a plus sign to an ellipsis (the three periods…). Click the altered button and you get a criteria bar with the Any, All, and None menu, as well as a new criteria bar indented beneath it.

Choose None from the menu; the bar now says None of the following are true. (See, it boils down to an English sentence that makes sense. Aren’t you glad you didn’t leave?)

In the criteria bar beneath this, set the first two menus to Name and begins with. Type autorecovery in the text field. (Since Spotlight performs the search as you define the criteria, you’ll likely have seen the total number of files found drop as soon as you put in this defintion.)

Now, another one: click the Add button for yet another criteria bar and set it to Name begins with word work. There! That makes the autorecovery and work files drop out of the list.

That’s it, except of course for saving your masterpiece of searchdom: click the Save button at the right of the Search bar and give the folder a name. By default, it will show up in the Finder sidebar, under Search For.

Check out my Macworld article for other (shorter!) tips about smart folders. (I’ll put the link in here as soon as I have a URL for it.)

The font is one that comes with Windows 7, Gabriola.ttf. It’s a script font that starts out pretty – and usable at smaller sizes for short blocks of text – and waxes into elegant beauty when you use some of its more advanced features, the glyph variants that give you all sorts of choices for fancy, swashy characters suitable for larger type sizes.The font has so many variants for so many characters, it’s a wonder it’s all included for free. Substitute a single, simple alternate character or two (as in the Z and r here):

Or up the ante with the more-upscale characters one at a time in a word -  as in “the” and “font” in this next picture – or use fancy replacements for multiple letters and add the free-standing swashes that draw themselves around the characters you’ve already typed, as in the Etch-a-Sketch-gone-wild “Gabriola” here.

Font heaven? Yes, unless you’re using Word, which, a decade into the twenty-first century, still won’t let you type any but pretty basic characters into its documents. Type them? It won’t even let you paste them in if you’ve typed them in a more intelligent program, like InDesign. Even TextEdit, while not supporting the most advanced typographic capabilities in this font, lets you use the basic alternate characters (as those in the Zither example). But Word refuses to deal with any characters that don’t have Unicode IDs but only glyph IDs (GIDs), a topic I explain more thoroughly in the ebook Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard (and its predecessor Take Control of Fonts in Leopard). You can’t enter them into a Word document even though you can see them in Character Viewer, and if you try to paste them in from another, more glyph-friendly program, they either disappear or turn into question-mark characters (depending on the characters).

Even though I use InDesign for layout, and so can access all these characters, I’m still extremely disappointed in Word. Bad Microsoft!

Okay, time’s up. Let’s start with the second example, Command-+ for Zoom In. How do you type a plus sign? With the Shift key. But you don’t use the Shift key with this command. Nobody has much of a problem with this, since it’s a natural thing – “Oh, there’s the Plus sign, I’ll just press Command and then that key.” There’s no Command-= shortcut in Safari to muddy these particular waters, and, besides, there’s the balancing command of Command-minus for Zoom Out, so the mnemonic is pretty much built in.

But it is a conceptual problem (because of the Command-= possibility), unless we choose to totally ignore the difference and treat Command-plus and Command-equals as exactly the same, which is pretty much what happens all over the place. BUT…

Now look at the Hide Toolbar command: Command-|. How do you type the pipe character? Shift-\. How do you trigger the command in Safari? You must press Command-Shift-\, despite the lack of any Shift-key symbol in the menu. Misleading. Messy. Miserable. (Is there an “m” word for “inconsistent”?)

Changing the menu listing to Command-Shift-\ would make it easier for users to understand, keep it more in line with the way keyboard equivalents are usually listed, and, as a bonus, keep it from looking like the letter i. (Which brings us to the issue of all those capital letters listed as keyboard shortcuts despite their not being shifted characters. Wouldn’t lowercase letters look beyond strange after 25 years of uppercase?)

Using the Help menu’s search field makes sense in Safari, since it scans the unwieldy History menu and its submenus from previous days, as well as your Bookmarks menu and submenus, and then lists the pages that match your search – obviating a trip to the Bookmarks window for a standard search. (Like other Safari 5 searches, it looks through URLs, page names, and page contents.) Point to something in the Menu Items list beneath the Search field, and the Help system opens menus and points to the listed item. Hit Return to open the highlighted page (or, of course, click on anything you can see).

Enter something in the Help menu’s search field and point to any of the hits that show up.

As you point to the item in the Help menu’s Menu Items list, the Help system shows you where it is, opening the History menu, and then an appropriate submenu, and uses that silly blue arrow to point to the item. And, in case you miss the silly blue arrow, it does a little circular massage motion there at the end of the menu.

You couldn’t miss the Help system’s HERE IT IS!! arrow if you tried.

Two weeks ago, as part of my ongoing medical adventures, I was waiting in my very own private walled-not-curtained pre-op cubicle for what, given my history, was a minor procedure. The doctor (one of my two very favorites) walks briskly down the hallway, spies me through the open door, and stops in:

“Sharon! Sorry to keep you waiting, I’m running behind. I have someone in the O.R. for a very short procedure—15 minutes—and you’re next. But, I’ve gotta tell you—I have NO free time at home anymore since I got my iPad! I just can’t put it down!

“Also, I have to ask you: I’m having trouble syncing my Blackberry to my Mac [he had just switched from a PC]. Maybe you can tell me what I should be using.”

And he was swiftly off to his other patient. The nurse in my little room, busy setting up an IV, looked a little taken aback during this exchange, although I couldn’t quite identify the look on her face. And then she said:

“I’m having trouble syncing my iPhone to my PC…”

That’s what it’s like being a Mac pro.

Wouldn’t trade it for any other job.

Except maybe Queen.

It’s easy to assume that you can enter phone numbers into Address Book fields in only one of two formats (123-4567 and 123-456-7890) because when you type in 7- or 10-digit numbers, the hyphens are automatically added for you. But you’re not stuck with just that. You can type more than 10 characters (such as 123-456-7890wk) and the first 10 will be formatted as expected, while the extra ones will just be tacked on to the end where you typed them. You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Top, the help tag for "normal" phone numbers on Mike's contact card. Bottom, after altering the numbers in Address Book to identify work, home, and cell numbers.