Have you ever been surfing the web and thought, “Gee, I have no clue what that is, I wish I could instantly look that up without having to touch my keyboard”?. Actually, you can. Just right click (or secondary click, whatever you like to call it) the word in question and select “Look up in Dictionary” (which also has a Wikipedia tab for those not in the know), “Search in Google” or if the need arises, “Search in Spotlight”.

This works with any application which contains selectable text, not just in web browsers. It is also quite useful when typing up a paper because you can look up synonyms to add variety to you writing in the thesaurus tab of Dictionary. When using Pages, the search options are all under the “Writing Tools” sub menu.

You probably already know that pressing Tab while in Safari, cycles through all the text fields on your current page. What you might not be aware of is that if you hold Option when pressing Tab, it will highlight the next object the site (or text field).

For example, if I hit Option + Tab while on the MacTips home page, the first object on the page gets highlighted in blue (in this case, the MacTips banner). To open a highlighted link, hit Return.

Ever since Safari 3, Apple has included an excellent feature in Safari called the “Web Inspector.” The Web Inspector is a surprisingly useful and practical debug tool that does not appear in Safari by default.

To launch and make use of the Web Inspector, one must enable Safari’s debug menu by running a simple Terminal command. We’ve discussed it in an earlier post, but here it is again:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Once the Debug menu is enabled in Safari, you can access the Web Inspector via two methods. One way is to select “Debug” from the menu bar and then select “Show Web Inspector.” The other way is to Control-Click on any part of a web page and select “Inspect Element.”

The Web Inspector launches as a large window with two main boxes, one containing code and the other containing a list of documents, stylesheets, images, and scripts. The Web Inspector will pull as many of these items from the web page you are visiting as it can. For MacTips, it finds the document for the page, the document for our Digg This plug-in, a handful of stylesheets, a bunch of images, and a few scripts that the site utilizes.

Once the Web Inspector is launched, there are a couple of ways to make it appear how you’d like it to. By default, it appears as a separate window and shows the code with indentations and expanding tags. You can set it to appear in-line with your Safari window by pressing the button that is second-furthest form the left along the bottom of the Web Inspector, which is shown at right, and you can change the code view to straight-up text by clicking on the non-bullet point icon at the top of the window, which is shown below.

The main point of the Web Inspector is to allow you to “inspect” snippets of code, and it does it excellently. One great way to utilize this is to highlight any “element” in a web page–some text, an image, or anything at all–then Control-Click on it and select “Inspect Element.” This will bring the Web Inspector straight to that element in the code for the page, and allows you to do exactly what it says, to “inspect” the “element.”

For those of you who aren’t big fans of Safari, a similar tool can be found in Firefox by installing the Firebug add-on.

While the Web Inspector has a couple of bugs itself, most technical users of Safari should find it quite useful. Its features are seemingly endless; each time I use it I discover something new. If you have any interest in web development or debugging, I highly recommend you give Safari’s Web Inspector a look.

This isn’t actually “Presentation Mode”, it just gets rid of all the bookmark bars, status bars, etc. This little trick would come in handy if say you were running a kiosk or presentation and didn’t want people to see your bookmarks bar/change the website. To do this, first hit Command + Shift + “\” (backslash) then hit Shift + Command + “B”.

These two services (TinyURL and shortURL) are great for taking long URLs and processing them so that you can use a different shorter URL to link to the original one. This is useful for stuff from IM, to Email and Twitter (got keep it under 140 characters!). In Safari there’s the script that uses the shortURL in an AppleScript that you can put in to Quicksilver trigger. For Firefox there’s the TinyURL extension, which adds an icon to your location bar that you click and can either make a smaller URL from a URL that you’re thinking of or the current page.

In the end you can take a URL like this: http://www.mactips.org/archives/2008/02/08/built-in-tinyurlshorturl-to-your-browser-safari-and-firefoxflock-respectively-to-shorten-long-urls/ and change it into this: http://tinyurl.com/yoexaq.

Zamzar is a great tool for those who need to convert videos on the go. It’s also ideal for those who want to download YouTube videos in only one step. To get started, go to Zamzar’s website and enter all the information needed (either choose a file from your computer to convert, or paste a link from YouTube/other site of that nature, then choose the output format, and give them your email address). Zamzar then uploads the file to their website and then converts it. When it’s done converting. you should get an email with a link to download your newly converted file. Files only stay on the site for 24 hours so act quickly.

Downloading Youtube videos isn’t as hard as you might think, it’s as easy as double clicking a link, given that link may be hard to find. The first step is to open Safari and locate the video you want to download. Then open the Activity window by pressing Option + Command + “A”. Then look through the Status column for the video file. It’s the one that’s a few MB’s as opposed to a few KB’s. Once you have determined which link belongs to the video file, double-click it. A new window will open (it will be blank) and then a download will start for a file called “get_video”. This is an FLV file which can be read by Quicktime with the right plugins installed, but I recommend converting it to a friendlier format ,such as MP4, by using iSquint.

Bookmarklets are basically short JavaScript codes that can be opened like a regular bookmark and apply a function to an open web page. One of the most interesting bookmarklets I’ve run into is the Open All Links bookmarklet. It simply locates all the links on a web page and asks you if you want to open them. It should work in any JavaScript-enabled browser (just about all of them.)

Add this link to your bookmarks and open it to activate the bookmarklet. Be careful when using it when there are many links on a page, because it can cause your browser to crash or at the very least go a little crazy.

WebClip is a new feature that’s built into Leopard’s version of Safari 3 (beta users need not apply). What it does is takes a little section of the internet and makes a self updating Widget out of it.

To do this, click the little scissors icon next to the Reload button, then choose the area you wish to be made into a widget. Once you have all that figured out, click “Add” and Dashboard will automatically open with your new Widget in the middle. It will say “Loading Clip”, this could take a while so let it load. Once it’s done, the result should look something like this:

Note: For some reason, not all the Widgets you make will work the way you intend them to (e.g. they won’t update, or it’s just a blank widget). The service isn’t 100% quite yet but it works all right.

In Safari, when you attempt to close a tab or window in which you have entered text, you get this little pop up which can get annoying at times. To get rid of it, open Terminal.app and enter this command

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugConfirmTossingUnsubmittedFormText NO