Tuesday
May032005
Safari Plugin
Tuesday, May 3, 2005 at 10:33AM
I had a cute idea for Safar the other day, but my lack of familiarity with programming in OS X is barring my ability to create it.
I make heavy use of tabs when browsing. Occasionaly, when I am doing some type of research or working on a problem, I will open too many tabs, and they start to get mixed up. It would be nice if a certain keyboard modifier (CMD-\d ?) would instruct Safari to add the clicked URL to a 'stack'. The \d (digit) in the modifier would give it a location in the stack. For example, if I was working on a problem and wanted to explore some avenues of my searches later, I could CMD-2 click them, and they would be added to the stack. Each successive CMD-2 would be pushed onto the '2' stack. CMD-3 would be 'under' all of the 2 items. Etcetera, etcetera.
Part of the problem is how to graphically represent the stack. It'd be nice if mouseovering the stack's contents would cause them to inflate and show some detail, like the Dock.
Serializing the stack and sending it to others or putting it on your site would also be cool. Jaxn suggested that OPML might be a good solution for that problem.
Now if I just knew where to start. I can't find any information on making a plugin that is NOT mime-type based for Safari. :(
I make heavy use of tabs when browsing. Occasionaly, when I am doing some type of research or working on a problem, I will open too many tabs, and they start to get mixed up. It would be nice if a certain keyboard modifier (CMD-\d ?) would instruct Safari to add the clicked URL to a 'stack'. The \d (digit) in the modifier would give it a location in the stack. For example, if I was working on a problem and wanted to explore some avenues of my searches later, I could CMD-2 click them, and they would be added to the stack. Each successive CMD-2 would be pushed onto the '2' stack. CMD-3 would be 'under' all of the 2 items. Etcetera, etcetera.
Part of the problem is how to graphically represent the stack. It'd be nice if mouseovering the stack's contents would cause them to inflate and show some detail, like the Dock.
Serializing the stack and sending it to others or putting it on your site would also be cool. Jaxn suggested that OPML might be a good solution for that problem.
Now if I just knew where to start. I can't find any information on making a plugin that is NOT mime-type based for Safari. :(
Reader Comments (2)
I think that you are onto a good idea. The particular keyboard shortcuts you mentioned are already used for something else, though. CMD-1 opens the leftmost non-folder in your bookmarks bar. CMD-2 opens the second one. Folders are skipped in the counting. That's a nit-picky detail that doesn't make your idea any less good.
Unfortunately, my desire to have such a plugin does not overcome the time investment it would take for me to learn how to implement it. Perhaps I will revisit the idea in the future and find some shred of documentation for Safari plugins.