It's the Little Things
Document Actions
Safari's surprising feature.
Sometimes it's the little things that really make me smile. This time, it's a pleasant little UI surprise in Apple's Safari web browser.
OK, say you've googled through to some page at http://some.host/some/deeply/nested/url. And the page is sort-of what you want, but you want a more general, broader context. What do you do?
- If you don't use Safari, you click in the address box and start deleting off parts of the URL, getting rid of
/url, then/nested/url, then/deeply/nested/url, until you find what makes sense. - If you do use Safari, you just right-click (or control+click for you silly one-button mouse users) the title bar and select whatever shortened URL you want.
Thanks, Apple. Thapple.
More great hidden settings
Posted by
Anonymous User
at
2008.10.01 02.34AM
Get Secrets pref pane from the Quicksilver author, it uses an always-updated online database to keep track of those hidden settings that are available through "defaults set" in the terminal:
http://secrets.blacktree.com
Some of my favorites:
- Safari → Open all new windows in tabs (similar to Firefox' default behaviour)
- Safari → Show Link URL in tooltip (the status bar is a waste of space, but I still sometimes want to inspect what the underlying URL of a link is before I click it)
- System → Login Window Text (allows you to put ownership info on the login screen, supports multiple lines of text)
- System → Expand Print Dialog By Default (why would you ever want the compressed, useless version? ;)
- System → Expand Save Dialogs By Default (ditto for save dialogs)
- iTunes → Show Genre when browsing (uncheck this to get rid of the useless genre browsing)
— Alexander Limi
Most well behaved Mac programs do this
This mirrors what most Mac programs have done for years although with the Command-Click. I think this dates back to System 7 in the early 1990's. Command click the title of a window in the Finder, BBEdit, CSSEdit or mosth other apps that edit documents and you get a nice path list of the Finder Folders. Safari responds to both Right Mouse, Ctrl-Click and Cmd-Click. Apple really should make right mouse click available in all of these contexts.
-- Lee Joramo / designKiln.com