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Mac 101: An introduction to keyboard shortcuts in Safari for Mac
More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. A long time friend of mine, who is also a long-time Windows user, has recently bought a MacBook Air. Like any transition, it's not been without its hiccups. But he's really pleased with his new purchase. He's also a first time user of Safari, so I've been showing him a few keyboard shortcuts to make browsing the web a lot easier. There are many helpful keyboard shortcuts to be found in Safari. Some simple ones are opening a new tab by hitting the command key (cmd) and T, so cmd+t. Another one is jumping straight to a bookmark by hitting cmd and a number key correspondingly assigned to your bookmarks (more details here). For instance, If BBC News is your third bookmark, hit cmd+3 to jump straight there. Here are a few I regularly use: Cycle through open tabs by hitting cmd+shift+left arrow (or right arrow). Cmd+click a link to open that link in a new tab. Cmd+alt+click to open a link in a new window. Cmd+w to close the active tab. Cmd+z to undo the last tab closed. Cmd+r to refresh a tab Shift+click a link to save a link to Reading List. There are loads more. I came across Shortcutworld.com, which has 58 keyboard shortcuts for Safari. With all these shortcuts, some are unusually placed, like adding a bookmark using cmd+d (logically "cmd+b" would make sense, but that's generally reserved for making text bold), or viewing the downloads folder with alt+cmd+l. You'd think the D key would be for downloads, but sadly, no! Fortunately, you can customize Safari keyboard shortcuts (as well as any other Mac app) to just about any way you'd like by going to keyboard preferences in System Preferences.
Friday Favorite: How Keyboard Maestro saved my Mavericks macros
Bless Keyboard Maestro. It's not as if we haven't already given it coverage here at TUAW, but I fought to make it today's Friday Favorite because it pulled my grits out of the fire after I upgraded to Mavericks. Me? I've been a Quickeys user since the freaking 1980's. One gets used to an app. Used to it enough that the thought of having to transition away from my decades-old keyboard macros to a new app was giving me hives. So I resisted, resisted, and then I resisted some more. After Lion debuted, I made excuse after excuse -- dropped a few of my daily macros, adjusted some others, and kept pushing forward with my old system just so I wouldn't have to start again from scratch. Startly, the guys who now own the app, hemmed and hawed, made some noises about eventual upgrades, but I was basically running abandonware. Finally when Mavericks debuted, my decades old macro set gave up the ghost. Even doing some emergency tweaks like switching off App Nap couldn't save my workflow. TJ Luoma, who had had just about enough of my "but my system works...or at least it worked" nonsense finally hit me over the head with a very large clue mackerel1. (The size of the clue-fish indicates how much this matters.) "Just. Use. Keyboard. Maestro." (I paraphrase.) So I did. Several weeks later, I am a rabid Keyboard Maestro fan. From its easy to use editor (with folders!) to its nuanced rule system (I can disable my keyboard Emacs equivalents for Terminal, Xcode, and Text Edit because they're already built into those apps natively), Keyboard Maestro is doing everything that Quickeys ever did for me but is doing it more smoothly, faster (seriously, no playback lag), and reliably. I love this app. It handles app launching, menu selections, complex sequences, and offers a solid Recording option that lets me demonstrate tasks rather than programming them. I can easily enable and disable shortcuts, which allows me to switch instantly from standard development mode to testing out Xcode betas. That's a huge time-consuming task for me usually. (Hint: You can bet I immediately remapped the new documentation keys for Xcode 5.1.) It's not just useful for development. I'm using Keyboard Maestro to apply AppleScript to QuickTime Player, adding timed skip actions for moving forward and back through videos. I've got it set up to enter my family's library card in Safari for when we need to reserve books. It's working in mail, helping to sort mail as I work through my inbox. In other words, it's not only doing all the tasks I normally relied on for my macros, it's opening new opportunities for me as I continue to explore its amazingly wide range of hooks. Keyboard Maestro costs US$36. It's free to download and you have 30 days to try it out before buying. I think I made it to day 3 before whipping out my Visa card. 1 The mackerel was, of course, a holy mackerel.
Google agrees to $17 million settlement in Safari privacy case
It's sometimes easy to forget, what with all of Google's various ventures and services, that the search giant's impressive revenue stream comes almost entirely from advertising revenue. To that end, Google has an extremely strong interest in keeping tabs on what users are up to online so that they can serve up targeted ads and keep that money train rolling. Google's zeal in keeping up with users' browsing habits backfired when a February 2012 report in the Wall Street Journal detailed how Google was skirting around a private web browsing setting in Safari. The report explained how Google was using specialized code that worked to keep track of a user's web activity even when privacy settings to block such tracking were enabled. The code in question affected both the desktop and mobile versions of Safari. Notably, no other web browsers were affected. With that quick refresher now out of the way, Macworld is reporting that Google yesterday reached a US$17 million settlement deal with the District of Columbia and 37 other states over the privacy misstep which Google claimed was more of an accident than anything else. In a press release announcing the settlement deal, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said: Consumers should be able to know whether there are other eyes surfing the web with them. By tracking millions of people without their knowledge, Google violated not only their privacy, but also their trust. In addition to forking over $17 million, Google also agreed to the following terms: Not deploy the type of code used in this case to override a browser's cookie-blocking settings without the consumer's consent unless it is necessary to do so in order to detect, prevent or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues. Not misrepresent or omit material information to consumers about how they can use any particular Google product, service or tool to directly manage how Google serves advertisements to their browsers. Improve the information it gives consumers regarding cookies, their purpose and how the cookies are managed by consumers using Google's products or services and tools. Maintain systems designed to ensure the expiration of the third-party cookies set on Safari Web browsers while their default settings had been circumvented. Further, Macworld relayed a statement from Google via email about the settlement. It reads: "We work hard to get privacy right at Google and have taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple's browsers." Lastly, it's worth noting that Google already paid out $22.5 million to the Federal Trade Commission for its little Safari adventure.
Google to pay $17 million as a penalty for unauthorized web tracking in Safari
Last year, Google ponied up $22.5 million to the FTC as a penalty for bypassing cookie settings in the Safari browser to track users. While Mountain View no doubt wishes this episode were far behind it already, the company will pay a pretty sum once again as the result of a settlement today: $17 million in a suit brought by 37 states and the District of Columbia over that very same practice of tracking users in Safari. From 2011 to 2012, Google used a loophole in Apple's browser that allowed for placing tracking cookies on users' machines without them knowing. The search giant's suffered more than a slap on the wrist, but it's still not admitting wrongdoing; in a statement, a spokeswoman said that the company "has taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple's browsers."
Friday Favorite: Yet another reason to love Printopia
I'm a huge fan of Ecamm's Printopia utility. For just 20 bucks, it enables you to print from iOS to any printer connected to your Mac. You don't need to buy a high-priced AirPlay-enabled system. I'm running Printopia with an old piece-of-junk Brother laser printer that is older than some of my kids. Until this week, I didn't really use Printopia's "Send to Dropbox" or "Send to Mac" features. I normally just connect my iPhone and iPad to my Mac using Image Capture to transfer pictures, which has been a terrific way to manage the images I need for TUAW write-ups. Yesterday, however, after installing Mavericks, that workflow broke. For whatever reason, Image Capture just would not connect properly to my iPhone. And that's when I thought of using Printopia rather than emailing individual pictures. The great thing about "printing" pictures is how well integrated the process is with the Photos app. It requires just a few taps to print. With Printopia's "Send to" options, I was able to transfer my pictures with a minimum of fuss and bother. Plus, bonus, I didn't need to connect any cables. It worked brilliantly. The convenience didn't stop there though. It occurred to me that I could "print" Safari articles that I wanted a copy of, directly from my iPhone without having to return to my desk. Sure enough, the Printopia Send to Mac option created a perfect PDF of the active webpage, saved it to my Documents folder and opened it in Preview. Although I haven't used these options much in the past, I can see myself starting to use them a lot more from here on. And, of course, Printopia still makes it simple and convenient to print from my phone.
Flash Player now sandboxed for Safari users running OS X Mavericks
If you rushed to upgrade your Mac to OS X Mavericks, congratulations -- you've just taken a big step forward in web security. Adobe has confirmed that Flash Player is now sandboxed in Safari for Mavericks users, preventing Flash-based malware from accessing code and resources beyond Apple's browser. The company is taking special advantage of OS X's new app sandboxing feature, which also minimizes the security risks for other plugins and programs. Safari is undoubtedly late to the party when Flash has been sandboxed for a while in both Chrome and Firefox, but we won't knock an upgrade that neuters many potential security exploits.
With Mavericks just around the corner, websites begin supporting Safari push notifications
Apple is expected to unveil -- and ship shortly thereafter -- the final version of OS X 10.9 Mavericks at its media event today. With the new OS' launch fast approaching, some big-name websites have decided to switch on Safari push notifications a little early, notes MacRumors. If you're currently running a build of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, you can navigate to The New York Times and NBA.com to check the new feature out. With Safari push notifications in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, users can choose to get popup alerts from websites announcing breaking news or other information, even when Safari is closed. The notifications will appear in your desktop and in OS X's Notification Center, as notifications do now in OS X 10.8, and will also appear on your lock screen under 10.9.
5 QuickTime Player Secrets
It's easy to overlook the power of the steady and dependable QuickTime Player. Built right into OS X, many users don't necessarily think of it as a sophisticated app. Despite that, Apple has engineered some great features for it. Here are five of our faves. Change the playback rate. When you're watching a lecture or presentation, sometimes you want to help speed things up so you can move through material a little faster. QuickTime Player supports this. Just click and hold on the play-pause button for about 5 seconds to access the rate change menu. It enables you to speed up or slow down the video playback rate with fine granularity. Edit the video. Press Command-E or choose View > Show Clips to enter QuickTime Player's edit mode. Here, you can split your video into clips, trim away sections you want gone, adjust clip order, and more. You don't need to track down an old copy of QuickTime Pro or fire up iMovie for simple edits. Scrub. QuickTime Player offers several ways to scrub your video. First, you can drag the play head along the scrub bar to set a rough position. You can also use the arrow keys to move frame-by-frame. With playback stopped, if you press and hold the play head for about 2-3 seconds, the scrub bar converts to a manageable 20-second range instead. Play Video Backwards. QuickTime Player offers a number of arrow key functions that go beyond simple scrubbing. For example, holding the Option key lets you jump to the start or end of your video. What's really cool is when you press Command-Left-Arrow. Your video starts playing in reverse. Repeat that key sequence to change the rate at which your movie plays backwards. (The same trick holds for normal playback. Command-Right-Arrow goes from normal play to accelerated options.) Float Your Video. A lot of people try to get some work done as they watch their favorite videos. But having Safari or Mail cover parts of the video can get really annoying. To ensure that your video gets the priority it needs to stay on top of all other windows, choose View > Float on Top. This option pushes the video to the front of the windowing system, ensuring that it won't be obscured.
Daily Update for October 16, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Safari tops Fixya mobile browser usability scores
Fixya is a Q&A website that compiles fix-it requests for a variety of items from cars and chainsaws to routers and monitors. Recently, the site turned its attention to mobile browsers, looking through a total of 61,582 different help requests for the category to determine which browser had the best usability score. The winner? Apple Safari for iOS. The company combined and analyzed data from the problem impressions on its site, mixed it in with market share data from NetMarketShare, and came up with a usability score. The higher the score, the fewer problem impressions Fixya saw in relation to total market share for a browser. Safari came in at 1.31, with the stock Android browser falling well behind at 0.87, Opera coming in at 0.70, Chrome at 0.64 and Internet Explorer dropping the ball at 0.28. When it came to Safari, most of the so-called issues dealt with the lack of Flash support in the mobile browser, along with the UI. However, it should be noted that most of the numbers were gathered prior to the release of iOS 7, so many of the UI issues (e.g., lack of screen real estate) have been addressed. The full report is available on the Fixya blog, and goes into tremendous detail about the pros and cons of every mobile browser.
How to search a webpage for a specific word in mobile Safari
One of the great, and yet little known, features in mobile Safari is that it allows you to search a webpage for a specific word. This feature is a lifesaver if you happen to come across a lengthy article, for example, and want to quickly skip ahead to a particular segment of the document. Here's how it all works. Let's say I hop on over to ESPN.com to check out the latest sports news. Here I see ESPN's splash page talking about the Red Sox playoff win. But let's say I need my football fix and want to quickly jump to any articles discussing Peyton Manning without having to scroll through the site's entire front page. So, to find any references to "Manning," I simply double tap the URL bar in mobile Safari, which brings me to this page. Next, I start typing my search query, in this case "Manning," into the Safari search bar. All I see next are listings of Google Search suggestions. But wait! There's more here than meets the eye. Scroll down and you'll soon see a section titled "On This Page" lurking below. The "On This Page" match indicates that there is one instance of the "Manning" string on the ESPN homepage. I give it a tap and I'm instantly whisked back to the area of the ESPN homepage where "Manning" appears. And to make things easier to find, it's conveniently highlighted in yellow. Pretty great, right? Now let's say I look for a phrase that appears multiple times across a document. For instance, upon typing "Brady" into the URL bar and subsequently scrolling down, I see that there are five matches on the webpage. I tap "Find 'Brady'" and am now taken to the first instance of "Brady" appearing on the webpage. To find other instances of "Brady," all I have to do is tap the rightward facing arrow located at the bottom of the display and I can quickly cycle through all mentions of the search string. All in all, this is a great search tool to keep handy when browsing through mobile websites where search functionality exists, but is somewhat buried underneath the surface.
Snoopy lets you examine websites with Mobile Safari
One of the weaknesses of mobile web browsers is the lack of a simple way to view a website's source information. Sure you could wait until you got home to examine how a site is built, but we live in the future. Waiting till we get home is very 2012. That's where Snoopy comes in. Snoopy is a bookmarklet that allows you to quickly view source, giving you a look at the doctype, the JS libraries the page uses, what analytics are used, a look at the raw source of the page and a number of other finer details. There are a few ways to get Snoopy to work in Mobile Safari. The simplest method is to simply drag the bookmarklet from the page, here, up to your bookmarks bar. Turn on iCloud or use an iTunes bookmark sync to your iDevice to have the link show up in your mobile bookmarks. If you use Google Chrome, simply save the bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Bar in your browser and then sync bookmarks between iOS and your desktop using your Google account. If you don't use syncing, there is another way available to get Snoopy installed that's a little more complicated. Head over to Snoopy's official page for a complete walkthrough of how to manually add the bookmarklet to Safari and Chrome. Get to Snooping.
CloudOn launches web editor, CloudOn Pro paid service
Many cloud-based productivity apps start on the web and eventually make their way to mobile devices. Not CloudOn: it just launched a web version of its previously mobile-only document editor. Mac and Windows users can now run a virtual Office session using a small plugin for either Chrome or Safari. They may have to pay for some functionality, however, as CloudOn is launching a paid CloudOn Pro service at the same time. Subscribers to the new tier get access to Office's more advanced features, including PowerPoint's presentation mode and Word's change tracking. The web app is available for free; those who want to go Pro can pay $30 per year ($3 per month) if they sign up before 2014, or $80 per year ($8 per month) afterwards.
Apple asks developers to prepare for Safari Push Notifications
Apple has sent an email to developers asking them to get ready for Safari Push Notifications, reports Cult of Mac. In the email titled, "Get ready for Safari Push Notifications," the company lays out what Safari Push notifications entail and directs developers to the Safari Push Notifications website. OS X Mavericks introduces a powerful new way to keep users engaged with your website. You can now use the Apple Push Notifications Service to send notifications to your website users, right on their Mac desktop -- even when Safari isn't running. Safari Push Notifications work just like push notifications for apps. They display your website icon and notification text, which users can click to go right to your website. While push notifications from websites may be a good thing for breaking news, it seems like its an area that's ripe for exploitation. If push notifications become push ads, it's a feature that will easily annoy instead of inform. Let's hope developers remember that so they don't ruin the fun for everybody.
It's the little things: The tiny changes that may make you fall in love with iOS 7
When Apple launches iOS 7 later this year it will be the biggest overhaul the mobile operating system has ever received. But with change comes fear, and there's already a divide forming between those who can't let go of the iOS they know and love and those who welcome the revamp with open arms. There are a number of relatively small tweaks and additions that have really sold me on iOS 7, and they may do the same for you. These aren't big things that you're likely to see on an iPhone commercial -- like automatic app updating or a smarter Siri, for example -- but they may indeed be just as important. Massive folders I can't tell you how excited I was when folders were first introduced to iOS, and though the feature did take care of the issue of having pages and pages of apps, I was soon left with several pages full of folders instead. Instead of allowing folders to just hold however many apps could fit on the drop-down screen like they do now, folders have pages that can be swiped through, allowing you to put all of your games in a single folder, all of your business apps in another, and so on. Smart contrast features Without the shaded black bars of iOS 6 and earlier to host the clock on the lock screen and the info section on the top of the home screen, picking a single color for these rather important bits of text would have made them hard to read against certain wallpapers. iOS 7 gets around this by monitoring the brightness of your background and adjusting the color of the font accordingly. Depending on your wallpaper the font will switch between black and white, and there's also a slight shading that will be applied to the areas around the text depending on what the system determines will be the easiest to read. It's a remarkably intelligent feature that could have very easily been completely overlooked. Safari's slick tabs To be fair, there isn't necessarily anything wrong with the way Safari handles tabs in iOS 6. It's functional, if a bit ugly, but it gets the job done. But when I first saw iOS 7's tab browsing feature I may have audibly uttered "oooh." Not only is it now possible to see many more tabs on a single screen, flipping through them is buttery smooth in a very CoverFlow-esque way. You can snap to the window you want and kill unneeded tabs much faster, all with the added bonus of it being just plain pretty to look at. Multitasking previews Yet another new feature that ups both form and function, the multitasking feature has been overhauled to offer a preview of the current state of the app, rather than just a list of icons that leave you to guess what exactly you might have been in the middle of. The preview windows look great and are large enough that you'll instantly know exactly where you were in just about any app, be it a game, messaging client, etc. I have a feeling this is going to be one of the features that we'll look back on next year and wonder how we got by without it. Newsstand finally falls in line Newsstand has been a problem for a long time. No, I'm not talking about the app itself -- from all accounts it's matured since its introduction and it's a reliable way to catch up on magazines and other editorials -- I'm referring to its ability to ruin an otherwise well-organized app collection. Ever since it was introduced, Newsstand has refused to be placed in folders or deleted, regardless of whether or not you have ever used it. Because of this, it's often one of the first things people remove when jailbreaking their devices, and if someone told me they voided the warranty on their device for the sole purpose of removing the offending app, I would have a hard time holding it against them. But now, along with the death of the app's skeumorphic design, comes the ability to grab Newsstand by the scruff of the neck and shove it into whatever folder you see fit. I hope you'll join me in saying: Finally.
iOS, Mac and Safari Dev Centers back up and running as of 6:15pm EDT
See those green boxes above? That's good news for iOS and Mac developers, as well as those who write extensions for Safari. Apple's Developer System Status page is now showing that the iOS, Mac and Safari Dev Centers are up and running again after an week-long outage. Apple's developer sites were taken offline more than a week ago in response to a security issue that may have exposed the names and contact information of some developers. Apple has stated that no application code, credit card numbers or other privileged information was exposed, and the company has been working to harden the systems since then. In addition to those welcome green boxes, the status page also shows that the all-important Certificates, Identifiers, and Profiles page is back up, and Software Downloads are ready for those of us who need to restore our iPhones to iOS 7.
Daily Update for July 16, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
The Loop looks at OS X Mavericks
Perhaps this post should have been titled "The Beard looks at OS X Mavericks," since the subject is about an article written by veteran Apple blogger Jim Dalrymple on his Loop Insight blog. Dalrymple's opinions are highly valued by Apple, and he received a 13-inch MacBook Pro and a copy of OS X Mavericks to evaluate for the blog. His blog post is a first look at the beta Mac OS, and he's actually quite happy with what Mavericks has to offer. Dalrymple pretty much decided that he'd use the Mavericks machine as his only work computer, doing his blogging, tweeting and all other work under the beta software, as "this was the only way to truly evaluate what the operating system could do." To begin with, Dalrymple was pleased to find that all of his apps worked under Mavericks. He was happy with the addition of Finder tabs (multiple tabs in one Finder window), and found Finder tags "a lot more useful than website tags." iCloud Keychain -- which syncs passwords stored on your Mac with any iOS device you choose -- was a feature that Dalrymple really finds to have a lot of potential, as it can ease password access from within Safari on iOS. Likewise, Dalrymple is happy with OS X Mavericks' Notifications, which now allow one-click replies without needing to launch an app. But he singled out Maps in Mavericks for special love -- one of his favorite features is the ability to take directions created with Maps on the Mac and send them to an iPhone or iPad with a click. It's a fun post by one of the top Apple bloggers and well worth a read. While Dalrymple can't divulge any new features due to the Apple NDA, he does a great job of explaining how the features that were touted during the WWDC 2013 keynote work in real life.
Apple unveils new version of mobile Safari for iOS 7
Apple announced some major changes to mobile Safari in iOS 7. First and most noticeable is a new full-screen look that extends the web page that you are viewing from one edge of your screen to the other. There's also an improvement in search that provides your with a smart search field when you tap at the top of the screen. You also can access all your favorites there as well. Navigation is improved with a new swiping gesture that'll move you from page to page. A new bookmark control shows bookmarks, shared links and your reading list and a redesigned tab feature shows a scrolling, cover-flow-like view of your open tabs. A tap and hold lets you re-order the tans and a swipe to the side closes them one at a time. You can also see your open OS X tabs at the bottom and are no longer limited to just eight tabs, which is a welcome change. You can read about additional changes in mobile Safari on Apple's website.
Apple unveils Keychain for iCloud, confirms 300 million iCloud accounts
Apple today at WWDC announced some changes to iCloud, including a new iWork for iCloud and a keychain feature that'll sync your logins across all your iOS devices. The keychain is a cloud-connected password manager that ties into Safari on the desktop and Safari on the iPad and iPhone. It'll save passwords as well as credit card information and more. Tim Cook also confirmed that iCloud now has 300 million accounts, making it the fastest-growing cloud service ever (even faster than Facebook). More than 300 million iOS owners use iTunes in the cloud and these folks have downloaded their content 35 billion times. Cook also confirmed that 240 million users are on Game Center and blew us away with stats on iMessages that confirm the service has transferred 800 billion iMessages and sent 740 trillion push notifications.
