MacTricksAndTips.com

We are moving on with some Pro tips for applications on your Mac and to make you into a real pro. Today we are going to feature Safari. The popular web browsing application. Although I don’t use Safari that frequently (I prefer Firefox) it does have some good features. Today I am going to explain to you some features that can take your usage of Safari to the next level. I am going to discuss some Private Browsing feature and what it does, some ways to control Safari background files and doing some cool things that you may not have noticed.

It was difficult to find a summarizing sentence for how cool this little trick is. In a nutshell, if you have a word in any Safari text box, such as the one used for searching on this site. When you press F5 a large list of words will appear, as shown in the image below.

Way back in March (feels years ago) I mentioned about Inquisitor. Well this web browser plugin which I think is really inventive has been released for Firefox (and IE but we wont talk about that). The idea behind this application is simple. Its designed to be a more informative search bar, it gives you lots of information in a funky way.

This is a little software plugin for Safari that enables you to improve the way you search. As the tag line of the application says it is like spotlight for the web. It gives you a bit more functionality such as refined searches with small descriptions, as well as this it also looks really cool.

Did you know that your Mac has a fully built Apache web server built right in. You can access it through http://localhost/~User/ with all of the files stored in /Users/~User/Sites/ . This is a full apache install. When you turn web sharing on from System Preferences (System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing), a very important step, you can surf you Mac and serve a very basic web page/site. The problem with this is that it doesn’t have php enabled. This is a problem for anyone who wants to take it a step further and start developing more dynamic websites. As a result I have written this guide which will show you how to enable it. There are two methods the long and hard way which usually encounters many problems or the quick and easy way. This guide is intended for Leopard so it may differ on older systems. If you do encounter any problems leave a comment. I will try and answer them with the best of my knowledge, although it is out of the scope of this piece. As a side note enabling this is usually for development only and not to actually serve websites on the net, since it is highly unsecure. They are designed for developing websites. If you do want to serve websites on the internet I suggest finding a web host or reading more in depth into how this technology works.