Mac Kindergarten

As you might know, at Mac Kindergarten, Safari is the web browser of our choice. Beside its speed we like the look and feel of it.

Today we will look at a great, free plugin/extension called SafariStand. We will see, how two of its main features, make Safari even faster to use (so there is more time for browsing and less for typing). Tab thumbnails and Quick Searches.This post is quite long, but trust me, it will definitely pay off in the end. We also added shortcuts for more experienced users. Nevertheless, we explain every step in detail, so everybody can follow.

Preview

Before we start, let’s look at what our browser will look like, after we completed this tutorial.

1) Thumbnails
Shows you thumbnails (read: small images) of all open tabs, looking like this:

This let’s you quickly find any web page, opened in a tab.

2) Quick Search
Let’s you search on a certain web page, right from the address bar. So, you could enter “g iPod”, to search for “iPod” on Google.com, instead of going to www.google.com, entering the search term and clicking Google Search.

 

 

This also works for a wide range of other sites, such as Wikipedia, eBay, amazon, etc. and is a real time saver.

So, let’s go for it, and set up SafariStand!

Installation

In order for this plugin to work in Safari, we will need SIMBL, a loader for plugins.

1) Go to its webpage.

In brief (for more experienced users): Download, install SIMBL and jump ahead to 5)
In detail: Just read on, we take it step by step.

2) Download the installer by clicking “SIMBL-0.8.2.tbz (Universal Binary)”.

The link is in the “Links and Downloads” box, located in the upper right corner of the page.

3) The file that is downloaded, is a compressed file. This means there are multiple files and folders stuffed into one file, so it’s easier (and faster) to distribute it on the internet.

Mac OS X supports a wide range of those compressed files, so just click it. It will be extracted and we can access all the files and folders inside. Read this post on installing application in Mac OS X.

After the compressed SIMBL file is extracted, our Downloads Stack will look like this:

4) Click the SIMBL folder to open it in Finder. Double click the SIMBL installer package to start the installer. Follow the instructions on the screen to install it.

Now let’s get SafariStand.

5) Go to the developers’s webpage and download it from there (the download links are in the upper right corner).

In brief (for more experienced users): Download the zip file, copy the file SafariStand.bundle to Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > SIMBL > Plugins and jump ahead to 18)
In detail: Just read on, we take it step by step.

We assume, you have the latest version of Mac OS X, Leopard installed on your Mac. If you are not sure which version you have, please contact us via the About page.

6) So, click “SafariStand3.0L157.zip” to download the compressed file.

7) Again, click it in your Downloads Stack to extract this compressed file.

This will add another folder to our Downloads Stack, named in the same way as the compressed file, only without the “.zip” in the end.

8) Click the folder to open it and take a look at its content.

9) The file, we are interested in is called “SafariStand.bundle“.

10) We need to copy this file into a specific location, in order for it to be loaded by SIMBL and us to use it in Safari. No worries, it will be easy.

11) Click the file once and from the Edit menu pick Copy SafariStand.bundle or press the shortcut, command-C.

12) Now the file is marked to be copied (note: nothing happened, yet. No copying or anything, the file just got marked to be copied).

13) Click on Macintosh HD on the left side of the Finder (under the Devices section)

14) Now navigate to the following directory:
Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > SIMBL > Plugins

15) Make sure you are in the Plugins folder by looking at the title bar of Finder. There it should read Plugins.

16) Now, from Finder’s Edit menu, select Paste Item (or press the shortcut command-V)

17) The previously copied file is now pasted in this directory.

18) Now quite and restart Safari to activate SafariStand.

19) Installation was successful, if you have a new menu bar item next to the Help, called Stand after Safari has restarted.

Usage

Congratulations, the difficult part is over. Now let’s explore the two features advertised in the beginning of this post.

Thumbnails of all open tabs

Tabbed browsing is great to keep your sessions organized and keep the number of windows low.

However, if you have a number of tabs open, it can become difficult to distinguish one from the other. This is exactly where this feature comes in. It shows you small thumbnails of all open tabs.

To activate it, do the following:

1) Surf as usual, using tabbed browsing (select File > New Tab to open a new one).

2) From the Stand menu, select Toggle Sidebar to display the sidebar, containing a thumbnail of all open tabs.

3) To adjust, how the thumbnails look and display the sidebar by default, select from the Stand menu, SafariStand Preferences…

4) Select Sidebar from the list on the left of the SafariStand Preferences window.

5) You can adjust the size of the thumbnail, the position of the sidebar and check the option to Show Sidebar by Default, to always display it.

Quick Search

Using this feature will enable you to simply enter “g”, followed by the search term (without the quotes) to perform a search on www.google.com for the term.

This is enabled by default so you could use it right away.Click in the address bar (or press command-L) and type “g Mac Kindergarten” to perform a Google.com search for “Mac Kindergarten”.

It’s important that the letter g and the actual search term are divided by a space, so SafariStand can tell the difference between search site (the g for Google) and search term (Mac Kindergarten).

Adding new sites to Quick Search

Of course, you are not limited to the default settings of SafariStand, you can add your own web pages. Let’s add eBay, so we can enter “ebay iMac” to search for iMac auctions.

1) Go to www.ebay.com and enter iMac as search term.

2) This gives us a long address in the address field, looking like this:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=iMac&category0=

The only thing we are interested in, is the term iMac, that we searched for.

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=iMac&category0=

3) Press command-L again, to highlight the entire address and press command-C to copy it.

4) From the Stand menu, select SafariStand Preferences…

5) Pick Quick Search from the list on the left of the Preferences window.

6) You see a list of predefined Quick Searches. The most involving japanese characters.

7) Delete all of those you don’t need/want by clicking on one you one to delete and then hit the delete button in the lower right corner.

8) To add a new one, click the new button in the lower right corner.

9) A new Quick Search entry is added, called untitled. Double click exactly on its default name “untitled” in to change its name. Let’s called it eBay.

10) Press the tab key to advance to the shortcut field. Enter “eb” (without the quotes). This is the actual shortcut (as the “g” for a Google search). “eb” means will will search for stuff on eBay like this: “eb iMac”.

11) Press the tab key again to advance to the URL field. Now press command-V to paste the long address, we copied before.

12) Now locate the term iMac in this address and replace it with @key. @key is the placeholder for the search term we will later enter in a Quick Search.

Click here to see, how the result should look like.

13) Done. Close the SafariStand preferences window and try out your new Quick Search. Simply enter “eb cars” (without the quotes) instead of a web address, to search for cars on www.ebay.com.

This works for almost every site, as long as there is a search box on the site and you can copy the address (=URL) with the search term inside.

Just add it to your SafariStand Quick Search list, replace the search term with @key and you’re good to go.

Some more suggestions for Quick Searches:

• Amazon
• YouTube
• Google Maps
• Google Images
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Wikipedia

Leave a comment or send us an email via the About page if you have trouble creating the Quick Search you want.

That’s all for now, but not for SafariStand. There is much more to explore and there will be some more posts on how SafariStand can make your web browsing life even better.

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Tags: add-on, freeware, Safari, SafariStand

Related posts:

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Replace Safari’s default Google search box

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SafariStand update - History Flow

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.