Unlike other free mail services, Gmail doesn’t inject ads into emails that you send. Like the others, however, it does display ads when viewing your mail. And with Gmail it’s a bit unsettling. Gmail effectively reads your incoming mail and pitches you ads based on its contents. The ads are, of course, algorithmically served, so it’s not like a team of Gmail slackers actually access your mail and decides what ads to show, but it’s weird none the less. Fortunately you can turn them off.

Install GreaseKit for Safari and then install the Gmail Without Ads GreaseMonkey script. The ads will vanish and leave you with a clean replacement for Mail.app.

Before:

After:

The frustration of clicking on the Next link increases with how many times you have to do so in order to find what you’re looking for. My sense is that Google doesn’t need increased page views, so let’s turn it off.

Auto-pagination is a concept whereby content spread across multiple pages is dynamically loaded into the current page. In practical terms this means no more clicking the ‘Next’ link if you’re not satisfied with the first 10 search results. Have a look at the video.

(Dramatic element added by The Dodos.)

To enable auto-pagination you’ll need two things.

GreaseKit

A WebKit version of the popular Firefox extension GreaseMonkey, GreaseKit allows you to run alternative rendering javascript scripts for popular web pages. To install it, you’ll also need to install the SIMBL input manager (okay, I lied. You need three things).

oAutoPagerize

oAutoPagerize is the script which works the magic. There are a few auto-pagination scripts available, but this one works. With GreaseKit installed, click on the ‘Install’ button on the script’s page and it should work the next time you search Google.

Unfortunately not every userscript works with GreaseKit, and perhaps even more unfortunately, the ones that do are not well tagged. You might have some luck by adding ‘Safari’ to your search on Userscripts.org. Good luck and enjoy the infinite scroll.

Dropbox is becoming more popular and they have an excellent video tutorial up at their site that explains the fundamentals of the program, so I’m not going to waste words here describing how it works. Instead, I’ll talk about five things that I keep synced between my two Macs with the help of Dropbox. I hope it gives you some ideas.

My AppleScripts

As far as I’m concerned, any action that requires more than a total of two mouse clicks and will be done more than once is a good candidate for an AppleScript. Many of my scripts are no more than an few lines long. But even such a small amount of code, when run repeatedly via a keystroke over a long period, will rescue a significant portion of my life from the doldrums of repetitive drudgery. I use FastScripts to run my scripts.

My TextExpander Snippets

What AppleScript is for repetitive tasks, TextExpander is for repetitive typing. I recently wrote about how to use TextExpander to perform custom searches from Safari’s location bar and since then I’ve become completely addicted to the method. In the past I’ve used TextExpander primarily when developing new websites, but these custom URL searches have suddenly made TE more important to me than every before.

My 1Password Keychain

The web is a dangerous place I’m told. 1Password keeps you a little bit safer by allowing you to create crazy strong and unique logins for every site you visit and save them in its custom 1Password keychain. The only problem with this solution is that if you’re ever on a computer without 1Password, you’re pretty much out of luck for logging in anywhere. By keeping 1Password in sync across your Macs, you remove this obstacle. Unless, that is, you’re forced to use a PC at work, in which case you’re out of luck.

My TaskPaper To Dos

If you work on multiple Macs, having your To Dos synced across machines is a no brainer. As I’ve written, I use HogBay Software’s dead simple TaskPaper to keep track of my pending chores and sudden inspirations, and while I do very much like the uncluttered and themable UI, the main reason I love the application is the plain text format in which it stores your notes. Total portability and compatibility with any app that can read .txt. It’s pure convenience.

My MarsEdit Drafts Folder and Preferences

Though I use TextEdit for the majority of my writing needs, I turn to MarsEdit when it’s time to add some markup and images to my words before sending them up to the web. MarsEdit allows you to store local drafts of your posts and see exactly how they will look on your site even without an internet connection. Keeping all my drafts as well as my custom macros synced up between Macs really is a necessity for me.

Your Dropbox

This is of course my personal list of files and folders that I sync using Dropbox, and you likely have a very different set of apps which are critical to what you do on your computer. So in that case, are you a Dropbox user? Has it improved your life like it has mine? Doing something interesting with it? If so, let us know about it in the comments. And if not, hopefully this article has given you some ideas.

Safari 4, however, has added some of its own functionality to the Google Search Box by way of ‘as you type’ search suggestions that, if selected, will bring up a Google search page with the selected results. About the new functionality, Daring Fireball writes:

The Google search field now populates the suggestion menu as you type with results from Google’s Suggest feature. For me at least, the suggestions are remarkably, almost spookily, good.

I agree with Gruber that the search suggestions are a significant new feature. But the fact remains that Inquisitor, which, again, let you search user defined engines without detouring through Google, is dead and gone. I’ve been grieving its loss.

Until today, that is. The idea struck me that TextExpander from Smile on My Mac can be rigged to let you search custom search engines from Safari’s location field, rather than the Google Search Box.

What’s TextExpander?

TextExpander is a typing assistant which lets you expand custom text abbreviations into longer, often used text snippets. For instance, if you find yourself replying a lot of emails in the same way, type your reply once in TextExpander and assign it an abbreviation. The next time you need to write that same email again, just type the abbreviation and TextExpander will expand it out for you. The powerful little preference pane will significantly reduce what Merlin Mann refers to as “idiotic typing time.” It’s 29.95 USD.

Using TextExpander to Perform Custom Web Searches

Each time you search a site a unique URL is generated which relates to your search terms. For instance, if you want to search Twitter, go to http://search.twitter.com/ and enter your search terms. I’ll use Mac Mini for my example. A search for Mac Mini will generate the URL http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mac+mini. It’s fairly easy to see how to perform a custom search from the Location bar by looking at this URL – just enter search.twitter.com/search?q= and then type your search terms. But as easy as it might be to understand how to search specific sites from the Location Bar, actually doing so requires an amount of manual labor (i.e., typing) that I’m not willing to complete. Here is where TextExpander comes in.

Go to a site that you often search and search for something. Have a look at the resulting URL. I’ll do a search on Flickr for “snow leopard.”

Next, highlight only the base URL and the search syntax up to your search terms as shown in the above screen shot (in my testing with various sites, everything after your search terms in the URL isn’t necessary to perform the location bar search Update: It is possible set up searches for URLs that have important search parameters after the search terms by using TextExpander’s “Position Cursor Here” command. Please see my response to Patrick in the comments for more details). Now go into TextExpander’s menu bar item and select “Create Snippet From Selection.”

TextExpander’s preference pane will open and from here you can add your snippet title and the abbreviation you want to use to expand it. For Flickr I’m using ’ssf’ (my choice here is motivated by the need to remember a few different search snippets: Google images will be ’ssgi,’ Delicious, ’ssd,’ etcetera). Have a look at the screenshot:

Your new Custom search is now set up and ready to use.

Using Your Custom Searches

The hard part is setting your new custom searches up (and that’s not too hard); the easy part is using them. Open up Safari and select the Location field (Command + L by default). Now type your abbreviation (’ssf’ if you’re following my Flickr example). After TextExpander expands your search URL, simply type your search terms and hit enter. If everything goes to plan, Safari will do the rest of the work (adding %20 between your search terms if your search is multiple words) and open up your results.

Here’s a video of the entire process from Snippet creating to performing your custom searches.

One of the best parts of using TextExpander to perform your custom searches is that you can have your cake and eat it too – that is, you don’t have to give up Safari’s new search term completion in the Google Search Box to perform your custom searches. Moreover, because TextExpander is a stand alone application and not a Safari hack, it should be more future proof and won’t break with the next release of Safari.

One somewhat entertaining Dashclip I’ve found is TwitPic. TwitPic lets you share photos via your Twitter feed by letting you upload and post from the site. On TwitPic’s homepage, there is a small Google Map embed that pans around the earth showing realtime photo uploads by Twitter users from around the world. It’s fun to watch and, because Dashclippings are updated in real time, you’ll see TwitPic photo uploads as they occur.

You can follow MacMembrane on Twitter and we’ll follow you back.

Transforming the long and complicated URL from the App Store into an acceptable Twitter form, however, is a somewhat convoluted process. First open up a plain text TextEdit window and drag the app’s icon from iTunes onto the document. Next, open up bit.ly (or your favorite URL shortening service) in Safari, paste in the URL open in TextEdit to shorten it. Copy your new short link to the clipboard and you’re set to post to Twitter. (And then you can close the bit.ly page and quit TextEdit without saving…)

This process is prohibitively cumbersome. I cobbled together the following AppleScript to ease the pain of posting shortened App Store URLs to Twitter.

on open appURL
	tell application "Finder"
		set ClipURL to location of internet location file (appURL as text)
		ignoring case
			if ((characters 1 through 4 of ClipURL as string) is not "http") then
				return "Malformed URL."
			else
				set curlCMD to ¬
					"curl --stderr /dev/null \"http://bit.ly/api?url=" & ClipURL & "\""

				set bitlyURL to (do shell script curlCMD)

				set the clipboard to bitlyURL
				move appURL to the trash

				tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
					set defaultNotification to "URL Shortened"
					set myAllNotesList to {defaultNotification}
					register as application defaultNotification all notifications myAllNotesList ¬
						default notifications {defaultNotification} icon of application "Safari.app"
					notify with name defaultNotification title ¬
						defaultNotification description ¬
						"Your bit.ly URL is on the clipboard and ready to paste." application name defaultNotification

				end tell

			end if
		end ignoring
	end tell
end open

How to Use the Script

To set up the script, first copy the code into Script Editor and save it as an Application somewhere you’ll have easy access to it (the Desktop is a good place). Once your script is saved, using it is easy. Drag your link from iTunes out onto the desktop. Now drag it one more time onto the droplet. The URL will be shortened and put on the clipboard and the webloc from iTunes will be moved to the trash.

It’s really useful, although a little difficult to explain. This short video illustrates what the script does.

I created this script using two sources. AppleScript droplets cannot handle URLs dropped straight from Safari (or iTunes) so it’s necessary to drop them into the Finder first. To get the droplet to recognize the .webloc file I used the code posted here by an unknown forum member. To convert the URL using bit.ly, I used Jonathan Berger’s TextExpander script.

If you know a better way to get App Store URLs, let me know in the comments. For the moment, I’m quite happy with this method.

There are a lot of Twitter apps for the Mac. I’ve tried most of them, but I keep coming back to Twitterrific. Its simple interface does what I want, when I want. Some of the competitors offer interesting features, but none of them work well enough to tear me away from Twitterrific. I do have a wish-list for Twitterrific that’s about a mile long—but again, that’s another story. Despite my recognition of its flaws, Twitterrific’s the Twitter app that works the best for me.

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. While we wait for a power user release of Twitterrific, here are a few of my own tricks and scripts that make the little app more usable for me.

See Realtime Responses to Any Tweeter

Twitter is an excellent way to get questions answered by others who may have first hand experience with your query. Sometimes, however, it isn’t you who asks the question, but someone you follow. If you want to see how people are replying to everyone in your timeline you can enable this in Twitter’s preferences. To do so, go to the Notifications tab under your account settings and select Show Me ‘all @ replies’ from the drop down menu. With this preference enabled, every time one of your followees is replied to, you’ll see the reply in Twitterrific.

Personally I don’t want to see everyone’s responses – it crowds Twitterrific. But there are still times when I do want to see responses to some particular Tweeter. When that happens, I use this simple script.

tell application "Twitterrific" to set theTweeter ¬
	to the screen name of selection
try
	tell application "System Events"
		key code 53
	end tell
end try
tell application "Safari" to open location ¬
	"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=" & ¬
	"@" & theTweeter

To use the script, have the tweet selected in Twitterrific that you want to see replies to. When the script is run it will open a Safari page with all the responses to the selected Twitter user. Until Twitter provides a way to see responses to a particular tweet and not just a user, it’s the best solution I can think of.

Open Links in a Tweet Via the Keyboard

Twitterrific has fair keyboard support, but one action that always had me reaching of the mouse was opening links embedded in Tweets. This script will look for links in Tweets and open them in Safari.

tell application "Twitterrific" to set theTweet to text of selection
try
	tell application "System Events"
		key code 53
	end tell
end try

-- John Maisey -- 29 Jan 2009 -- www.nhoj.co.uk --

set myResult to {}
-- Items that you expect will be after the end of the URL.
set terminatorList to {" ", ">", ".", ",", ")", return, tab}
-- Split by 'http://" and only get the second to the last parts.
set myList to my textItemDelimiterSplit(theTweet, "http://", 2, -1)
-- Loop through list returned.
repeat with myItem in myList
	-- Loop through possible ending characters .
	repeat with myTerminator in terminatorList
		-- Split by the ending character.
		set myItem to my textItemDelimiterSplit(myItem, myTerminator, 1, 1)
	end repeat
	-- Add the result to an array.
	set myResult to myResult & ("http://" & myItem as text)
end repeat
try
	open location myResult
end try
on textItemDelimiterSplit(theText, theTID, theFrom, theTo)
	try
		set my text item delimiters to theTID
		set myReturn to text items theFrom thru theTo of theText
		set my text item delimiters to {""}
		return myReturn
	on error
		return {}
	end try
end textItemDelimiterSplit

An important note: The meat of this script was written by the very talented John Maisley, the maker of iCal Dupe Deleter. A big thanks to John for his help here. I have left his relevant in-script annotations intact.

Translate a Tweet

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently living in Korea and making some attempt to learn a bit of the language. To this end, I follow a few Korean speaking Twitter users. My Korean is coming along, but much of the time I still need some help from Google Translate. The following script will translate (almost) any selected Tweet in Twitterrific into English using Google Translate.

tell application "Twitterrific" to set transMe to text of selection
try
	tell application "System Events"
		key code 53
	end tell
end try
tell application "Safari" to open location ¬
	"http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=" & ¬
	transMe & "&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8#"

Get the Permalink for a Tweet

Occasionally I want the permalink for an interesting Tweet and there are two quick ways to get this in Twitterrific. Firstly, you can simply click and drag the Tweeter’s user picture associated with the Tweet onto Safari’s icon. Safari will open up the permalink in a new tab. If you don’t want to bother with the mouse, however, you can use this simple AppleScript:

tell application "Twitterrific"
	set theId to the id of selection
	set scrnName to the screen name of selection
end tell
try
	tell application "System Events"
		key code 53
	end tell
end try
tell application "Safari" to open location ¬
	"http://twitter.com/" & scrnName & ¬
	"/statuses/" & theId

Make Growl Notifications of Replies to Your Tweets Sticky

Twitterrific has built in Growl support which throws up a notification whenever new tweets are retrieved in Twitterrific. If you can handle the distraction, this is the best way to keep real-time tabs on everything that’s happening in the Twitter lives of those you follow. Despite the ‘in your face’ nature of Growl notifications, however, there is also a decided transience to their usefulness. One can become quiet immune to their presence when they’re always popping up. When someone replies to me on Twitter, I want to know it. Thankfully, it’s easy to enable ’sticky’ Growl notifications for Tweets which contain replies to you.

Open up Growl’s preference pane and navigate to the Applications tab. Find Twitterrific in the list of supported apps and double click it. Under the Notifications tab, select ‘Reply Arrived’ and set Stay on Screen to ‘Always.’ You can even add a sound to the notification if you like. With Growl set up this way, each time someone replies to you in Twitter that Tweet’s Growl notification will stick around until you intentionally dismiss it.

My favorite way to run AppleScripts is FastScripts, which allows you to add keyboard shortcuts to scripts and limit their scope to application sensitive contexts. If you have any trouble with any of the scripts here let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

You can follow @PeterVk on Twitter (that’s me) or @MacMembrane to receive links to all the latest posts. If you have any of your own Twitterrific or Twitter tips post them in the comments for everyone to see. Happy Tweeting.

What You Need

A free Delicious account. Delicious is an online bookmarking service that lets you tag, share and search interesting or reference pages that you find online. I’ve been using Delicious for over two years now and have posted over a thousand pages to the service. Apart from the social aspects, storing your bookmarks in the cloud has the killer benefit that you can access them from whatever computer you happen to be in front of from where ever you are in the world.

Inquisitor. Inquisitor is a free Safari addon that adds Spotlight-like predictive search to Safari’s Google Search box. I’ve raved about it in the past. What makes Inquisitor so sublime, however, is that you can add custom search engines to Safari and assign a keyboard shortcut to each one. It’s a beautiful thing.

The Quickest Way to Search Your Delicious Bookmarks

To search your Delicious bookmarks from Safari, you’re first going to need a custom URL. Check it out:

http://delicious.com/search?p=%@&u=YOUR_USERNAME&chk=&context=userposts&fr=del_icio_us&lc=1

Replace YOUR_USERNAME with your Delicious user name (see it in the upper right corner of Delicious.com if you’re logged in). Copy your new URL onto the clipboard.

With Inquisitor installed, open up Safari’s preferences and select the new Search tab at the far right of the top pane (it bears the Inquisitor icon). Click on the ‘Edit Sites’ button and add your new custom engine. Assign it a keyboard shortcut if you’re set.

Let me know if you’re having any problems setting it up. If you have a favorite Del.icio.us client that you use, post a link in the comments. Happy bookmarking.

Hotspot Shield sends your connection though an private American VPN network. In other words, it tricks websites into thinking that you’re internet connection is based in the US. Thus, sites like Hulu.com magically work.

Hotspot Sheild isn’t the kind of service you want running at all times, as it does put a banner add at the top of webpages that you visit. However, if you want to watch some internet TV and you’re not in the States, give it a try. But I have to keep this short because I’m in the middle of an episode of The Office.

Center All Open Windows

If you have a bunch of windows open all over your screen, go to the Window menu and hold down Option. ‘Bring All to Front’ will change to ‘Arrange In Front,’ which will center all your windows.

Command-1 or 2 or 3, etc. to Select Bookmark Bar Bookmarks

Press Command-1 to 9 to select bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar. Also works if you save JavaScripts to the Bookmarks Bar for extra functionality.

Close All But the Active Tab

Command-Option-W will close all tabs but the current one. Or Option click on a tabs closure X for the same effect. If multiple windows are open but have no tabs, Command-Option-W will close all of them.

Hide the Toolbars

Sometimes toolbars can get in the way. Look under the View menu to hide the Bookmarks Bar, Toolbar and Status Bar. Or better: try this near-full-screen Safari AppleScript.

Merge Your Open Windows

Again in the Window menu, Merge All Windows will collect all of your open windows into a single one. You can also drag tabs between windows for à la carte tab management.

Open Select Portions of a Page in Dashboard

Dashclip allows you to take any section of a webpage and make it into a Dashboard widget. Find it under Safari’s File menu.

Summarize Text in Web Pages

Highlight some text in a page and go to Summarize in the services menu. A popup window will open with your text compressed to the essential bits. It’s intelligent.

Define Any Word on the Fly

Hover over a word and invoke OS X’s system wide dictionary by pressing Command-Control-D. Look near the bottom of the pane to switch to Thesaurus.

Command-Option Click to Open a Link in a New Window

Hold down Command when you click a link in and it will open it in a new Tab. Hold down Comand-Option and it will open in a new Window.

Instantly Return to Any Page

Snapback is like a temporary bookmark. It’s a great way to return to a main article in Wikipedia or Google search results after you’ve inevitably followed too many disparate links. Mark your page and return to it via the History menu.

Find a Particular Tab’s Browsing History

Click and hold the Back button in any tab to see the history for that tab only.

Open All Links in a Bookmark Folder

Hold down Command to open all the links in a Bookmarks folder in the Bookmarks Bar. If you already have that folder set to open all contained links (you can set it so from the Show All Bookmarks panel), holding Command will let you view the contents of the folder instead.

Quickly Search Google

Right click on a word and select Google Search from the contextual menu. Hold down Command to have your search open in a new tab.

Use the Activity Window

Select Activity from the Window menu and a new window will open detailing everything that is happening behind the scenes on all your open web pages. From here you can open or download any page element (source code, style sheet, media) by double clicking. Read Secrets of Safari’s Activity Window for more details.

Launch Downloads from the Download Window

Safari’s Download manager may be sparsely featured, but you can open any file in the list directly by double clicking on its icon.

Open an Address in a New Tab

Hold down Command when opening a url from the location field and it will open in a new tab.

Force Stubborn Site Links to Open in New Tabs

Command clicking on a link will open it in a new tab most of the time. However, some sites are able to override Safari’s commands and have links open in the same window. Enter this command in Terminal to regain control:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Via MacTips.

Reopen All Windows After a Crash

Unfortunately, Safari doesn’t yet support reopening tabs from a previous session. If Safari crashes, however, you can quickly restore your windows from the History menu.

Hold Option When Entering Private Browsing

Private Browsing mode in Safari temporarily disables history and cookies and so your browsing history is kept secret. Hold down Option in the application menu when selecting it to kill the redundant explanatory dialog box.

Drag Files from Finder onto Choose File Dialogs

Sometimes you need to upload something and it’s a pain to navigate your HD when the file you need is sitting right in front of you in finder. Drag it onto the choose file link instead to save some time and hassle.

That’s it for now, but if these aren’t enough check out Tips, Tricks and Add-ons to Maximize Safari’s Potential and It’s a Drag: the Power of Drag and Drop in Safari.