Showing posts with label Web page. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Ten Safari shortcuts you should know

Ten Safari shortcuts you should know

While I like my Magic Trackpad, and the trackpad on my MacBook Air, I do as much as I can from the keyboard.

As such, I use LaunchBar () to launch applications, and have learned a number of essential iTunes shortcuts to save time when I work with my music collection.
I know dozens of shortcuts for the apps I use most.

Since it's easier to use the keyboard - no need to move my hand to my trackpad - I've memorized a handful of useful shortcuts for browsing the Web.
Here are ten that I think are essential.Â (These should work in both Snow Leopard and Lion unless otherwise noted.)

1. Quickly enter URLs

When I want to type a URL, I don't use a mouse or trackpad to click in the Address Bar, clear it, then type. Just press Command-L, and all the text in the Address Bar is selected, so whatever you type replaces it immediately. Start typing a URL for a favorite site, and Safari can auto-completes it by looking at your history or bookmarks. If Safari displays a list of sites, use the up- and down-arrow keys to choose the right one, and then press Return to go there.

2. Search in a snap

Like everyone, I search a lot using Google. Why click in the Google search field when you can go there by simply pressing Command-Option-F? Remember this shortcut, as it works in many Apple programs. Use it in Mail, iTunes, Address Book and more when you need to zip to the search field.

3. Hop to your history

There are times when I want to browse my History list to find a Web page I visited recently, but whose URL I can't remember. Pressing Command-Option-2 takes me to the History list, and puts the cursor in the search field. I can type a word or two and narrow down the display to find what I want. Double-clicking an entry in the History list takes me to that page, and pressing Command-Option-2 again takes me back to the previously visible Web page.

4. Scroll with the spacebar

When I get to my favorite Web page, I rarely bother to use scroll bars, or even my trackpad, to scroll. Just press the spacebar, and Safari scrolls down one screen. Need to go back up a screen? Press Shift-Spacebar. It's fast and efficient, and doesn't make me dizzy watching the page move up and down.

5. Open tabs in the background

Safari’s Tabs preferences show the shortcuts you can use to create new tabs. Go to Safari -> Preferences and click on Tabs to see these. The shortcut I use most is Command-Shift-click, which opens a new tab in the background. I use this a lot when I’m doing research on the Web and want to open several pages from search results without looking at them right away. Safari's tabbed browsing is a practical way to have several Web pages open at once without getting confused by multiple windows. IMAGE - SAFARI-TABS Safari's Tabs preferences let you choose how you want tabbed browsing to work, and show you the available keyboard shortcuts according to your settings.

6. Navigate your tabs

Use Command-Shift-Left Arrow or Right-Arrow will take you from one tab to the other. Just make sure that your cursor isn’t in a text field on any window displayed in a tab

7. Send a page (or its URL) to a friend

To email a neat Web page you’ve found to a friend.

Command-I does the trick; it takes the contents of the page and send it to the person in a new message in Mail, with the page’s title as the message subject.
Command-Shift-I Will just want to send a link

8. Save pages for later

New in Lion is Reading List, a sort of temporary bookmark list that you can use for pages you want to come back to and read later. If you press Command-Shift-D, you can add the current page to the Reading List.

9. Save links for later

The above Lion shortcut works when a page is visible. If you want to add a linked page to the Reading List - a page in search results, or a link, say, on the main page of macworld.com - just hold down the Shift key and click on that link

10. View Lion’s Reading List

To view the Reading List, you could click on the eyeglasses icon in the Bookmark Bar, if it was visible. Since we’re discussing keyboard shortcuts, however, instead you use the easier method of just pressing Command-Shift-L.

Concepts:

Mac, Shortcuts, Tabs, Safari, Command-L, Command-Option-2, Command-Option-F, Command-Option-2, Command-Shift-Click, Command-Shift-Left Arrow, Command-Shift-I, Right-Arrow, Command-Shift-D, Command-Shift-L, Lion, Macworld, Business, Accessories

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Sparrow for Gmail 1.0b5 Review

Image by blogjunkie via Flickr

Source: Macworld

Promising Prospect: Sparrow for Gmail

Sparrow for Gmail 1.0b5 Review

By Dan Frakes, Macworld.com - November 17, 2010

One of the drawbacks of Google’s Gmail e-mail service is that the Website’s interface lacks some of the nice features of a dedicated e-mail client. For example, clicking an e-mail link in a Web page or a document doesn’t open a new Gmail message window, and you can’t drag a document to an icon in the Dock to attach the file to a new message. You can configure an e-mail client such as OS X’s Mail to access your Gmail account via IMAP, but Gmail’s approach to message organization doesn’t always work well with an IMAP e-mail client—plus you lose out on some of Gmail’s popular features, such as labels.

An alternative is an e-mail client specifically made for Gmail. I previously covered Mailplane, which takes a Web-page view of Gmail and wraps it in an application shell. The benefit of Mailplane is that, within Mailplane’s window, Gmail still looks like Gmail—if you like the way the Gmail Website works, Mailplane preserves that interface.

If, on the other hand, you prefer the features and interface of a traditional e-mail client, a promising alternative is Sparrow, a Gmail client currently in beta. At first glance, Sparrow looks a lot like Tweetie for Mac, with your account icon on the left, and below it icons for your Inbox, Starred mail, Sent mail, labels, Drafts, and Trash. If you’ve got multiple Gmail accounts configured, each account’s icon appears in the list; clicking an account icon “expands” that account—again, Tweetie-style—to display the icons for that account’s various views, while collapsing other accounts.

(Image courtesy of sparrowmailapp.com)

Click any view’s icon to display a list of corresponding message to the right. Double-click a message to view it in a separate window, or, if you’ve chosen to show Sparrow’s preview pane, simply select a message to display it to the right of the message list.

You work with messages much as you would in Mail. Sparrow even uses OS X’s Address Book, auto-filling contacts as you type them into the recipient fields of messages. But unlike Mail, Sparrow supports Gmail-specific features such as labeling, archiving, and starring messages. You can also set up aliases so, for example, you can use a different From address than your primary Gmail e-mail address, and you can view message conversations in an interface that looks more like Gmail than Mail. The program also provides audible and Growl alerts when new mail arrives.

As I mentioned, Sparrow is currently in beta, and it shows: In testing the current pre-release version, I regularly had to quit and relaunch the program to get it to load new messages; the preview pane didn’t always show attachments; and resizing the main window occasionally resulted in onscreen artifacts. But I’m looking forward to updates, as Sparrow has lots of potential for fans of Gmail.

think-act-do

Tuesday, August 2, 2011