Safari 2.0 Toolbar hackery

By Laurie A. Duncan

YJ, another loyal TUAW reader and purveyor of produce for stupidchicken.com, sent us some Safari 2.0 tips for all yout Tiger cubs. You can see a handful of them on his blog, but here's his how-to on adding a "new tab" button to your Safari toolbar.

  1. Backup Safari.
  2. Install Xcode (from the OS X DVD). A bit overkill for that one button, yes.
  3. Open Safari's package contents (right-click, show package contents)
  4. Navigate into Contents, Resources, English.lproj
  5. Open ToolbarItems.nib (double clicking should open with Interface Builder)
  6. In the "ToolbarItems.nib (English)" window, double click on "First Responder"
  7. Press Cmd-Shift-I to bring up the Inspector window, if it's not already open
  8. In the Inspector window, press Cmd-1 to make sure you're looking at "Attributes". Click on Add, and create a new item called "newTab" (without quotes)
  9. In the "Toolbar Items" window, click on one of the "torn pictures" and press Cmd-Shift-I to bring up the Inspector window if it's not already open
  10. Select the one nearest the address bar (this should correspond to the placement in the "customise toolbar" menu), this is the "Add Bookmark" button
  11. Press Cmd-2 or choose "Connections". Select "newTab" and click "Change Action" or simply double-click on it; there should be a round pushbutton icon next to it now.
  12. Save, quit and test.
  13. If it works, yay! If not, ummm, it wasn't my fault. I hope you remembered step 1.

YJ's wise disclaimer, which I will echo: the method here worked for me and I make no guarantees that it'll work for you, even though it should. Don't blame me if your shiny new OS X goes to bits because of this.

For those still on Safari 1.2 or 1.3 in Panther, you can achieve the same thing by using the free Safari Buttons app from Plan8.
 

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