History of Science OnlineCourse Info: HSCI 3013 - section 995 - Fall 2008 |
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Safari set-up tips
Safari is very easy to use. This image, from the Apple Safari web page, suggests some of its handy features:
The
first thing to customize in Safari is the View Menu (right).
I recommend checking every item in the top section except the Bug report button.
That is, check Address Bar, Back/Forward, Home, Text Size, Stop/Reload, Add
Bookmark, Google Search, etc. Make sure that Google
Search is checked! Also check the Bookmarks
Bar and the Status Bar.
Next you are ready to set Safari preferences. Choose Preferences from the Safari Menu, and click the General icon at the top to show the settings displayed below.
Set Home Page. Go to the page that you want to use as your home page (your favorite news page, your own home page, the course web page, your web project page, etc.) and then click the "Set to Current Page" button. Decide whether you want every new browser window to automatically load this page, and set "New windows open with:" to reflect your decision. (Since I have a Home button on my Safari tool bar, I prefer to open to an empty page, just because I am often in a hurry to go somewhere else.)
Manage Downloads. In the Safari general preferences, you can set downloaded files to be saved in a specific location. To reduce desktop clutter, you may want to create a folder on your desktop called "Downloads," and select it here.
Read pdfs with Preview. Mac OS X comes with a fast and versatile pdf reader: the Preview application. You will find Preview in your Applications folder. Drag it to the Dock so that it will always be handy.
Tip: You can open an image file in Preview and then save it in some other format. This is a handy way to convert from one kind of image (eg, tiff or pdf) to another (eg, jpg).
Safari pdf plugin. Preview is a great application for reading pdfs, and it's very fast, but sometimes you may want to read a pdf within a Safari window rather than downloading it to your hard drive. This functionality is built-in with Safari under Tiger (OS X 10.4). However, if you still have Panther (OS X 10.3), there are two choices (both free): Adobe Reader 7 plugin or ShubertIT pdf plugin. The Adobe Reader 7 plugin is slower but has more features than SchubertIT, and is automatically installed when you install a full version of Adobe Reader 7 (you can still read pdfs with Preview after installing Adobe Reader). One limitation is that the Adobe Reader plugin only works with Safari. If you prefer Firefox or some other browser, install the "PDF Browser plugin" from SchubertIt, available at http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/. This plugin is free for home and educational use, and works well with both Mozilla Firefox and Safari.
To complete your customization of Safari, be sure to check out the tips listed on the browser tips web page.
Note: I recommend using the public beta of Safari 3, which works better with some websites that were diabolically designed exclusively for Internet Explorer without regard for Web standards (like D2L). Although Safari 3 is now in beta, it is quite stable, and should be officially released in October 2007 as part of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Safari 3 is the fastest and most standards compliant web browser available for both Windows and Macintosh.
An excellent website where you can find all sorts of additional Safari plugins and extensions is pimpmysafari.com.
Are you new to the Mac or to Mac OS X? If so, check out these new Mac user resources.
Do you have a great quote for this page? Let me know! (If used, a new quote is worth 1 point extra credit)
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HSCI 3013. History
of Science to 17th century
Many thanks to Mythology
and Folklore and other online courses developed by Laura Gibbs.
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