safari Archives - Tech Stuff

October 2, 2016

So how do I do that then…

One of the issues when using a new laptop or a new operating system, is remembering how to turn on everything you use regularly or sometimes turning them off.

I download images from my Flickr collection quite a bit, probably more so than using Photos or iPhoto. With a new Mac laptop I was getting very slightly annoyed that after downloading the images, they would open in Preview. I knew on my iMac I had turned this off, but could I remember how, no I couldn’t. I had done it a fair few years ago now, as I had migrated my settings to the new iMac (and I think I even did it before that one too).

I did do a quick Google search and saw that it wasn’t a Preview setting, but was a preferences setting in Safari. I was using search terms such as stop Preview opening downloaded images but I suspect a better search term would have been stop Safari from opening downloads.

So from the menu, Safari -> Preferences.

Click the General tab if isn’t showing already.

At the bottom is a check box, which says: Open “safe” files after downloading. “Safe” files include movies, pictures, sounds, PDF and text documents and archives.

I do like how Apple puts safe as “safe” which means they should be safe, but should be treated as “safe”.

Uncheck the box and Safari will no longer open files automatically.

Preferences

What I usually do is if I do want to open them, say a PDF, is I drag the file from the Downloads folder onto Preview in the Dock.

April 5, 2013July 12, 2019

Safari Crashing

Over the last few weeks I have had an annoying bug when using Safari on my iMac running Lion. Now and then when I add a new tab (to paste in an URL, or opening a link or image in a new tab) Safari just quits.

If I restart Safari it “kindly” re-opens all the pages I had open, not always convenient if I was logged into an e-mail service or my blog.

It must be a bug with Safari as more often than not I am opening a blank tab, not clicking on a particular link or something similar.

At the moment it is annoying and a search of the internet tubes seems that I am not alone. However there doesn’t appear to be a solution either.

March 12, 2011

iPad vs iPad 2 comparison: RAM performance in Mobile Safari

Useful comparison of how the 512MB RAM in the iPad 2 makes a real difference to browsing using Mobile Safari with multiple “tabs” open.

If you rarely use the multiple “tabs” feature then this may not be of benefit, but this is something I often do, with multiple windows open. The refresh was quite annoying, especially if I had text entered into a text field.

However is this enough justification to upgrade from iPad to iPad 2?

via TiPb

September 7, 2009

Gurt Big Icons

One of the nice features of Snow Leopard is the 512 pixel wide icons – can you still call it an icon.

Safari Icon

Cult of Mac has a wonderful gallery of said icons with Leander Kahney’s commentary on the detail Apple has in these icons is almost art in itself.

All the icons for folders and apps in Snow Leopard are now drawn in glorious 512 x 512 pixels. It’s a step toward making the operating system resolution independent, and perhaps also to make Snow Leopard a touchscreen friendly OS.

But it’s also obviously done just for the art of it. These icons are real beauties. They are full of great details and little surprises. One icon contains the words to a song, visible only if you blow it up to its full size.

See the gallery.

June 18, 2008

No more .Mac bookmarks

Though I do use .Mac to sync my bookmarks over several computers (with differing levels of success) I do also use the web version quite often on computers that don’t have .Mac support (eg PCs) or that I don’t own.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I received the following e-mail from Apple.

Dear .Mac member:

As you may know, your .Mac subscription is being upgraded to MobileMe, Apple’s new Internet service for your Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, and PC. This includes a new way to manage bookmarks across your computers and even push them over the air to your iPhone and iPod touch.

As part of the transition to MobileMe, web access to your .Mac Bookmarks will end in July 2008 and you will no longer be able to access or update your bookmarks at mac.com. Mac-to-Mac sync will not be affected.

To avoid losing bookmarks saved on .Mac, please sync them with your Mac before June 30. This will ensure that MobileMe can keep your bookmarks in sync going forward. Here’s how.

For more information on the transition, please visit the MobileMe FAQ.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

The .Mac Team

I can see that it may make things better, but for me losing the web bookmarks will be inconvenient.

June 16, 2008

The Cloud “killed” my iPod

Okay to say that a Cloud wifi hotspot killed my iPod is exaggerating somewhat, however it did kill Safari for a while and certainly wasn’t easy to sort out.

iPod touch

I had used my iPod touch at a free wifi hotspot which used the Cloud network.

I had signed in and used the web and no problems.

A few days later I wanted to use the web again on the iPod, but regardless of which site I tried to use whether it be entered manually or through a bookmark, Safari on the iPod just reverted back to the Cloud login page!

I couldn’t log out as I was not connected to the Cloud.

So I switched the iPod touch off and no luck, it still revered to the Cloud login screen.

Now I was getting annoyed.

I knew it wasn’t a connectivity issue, as I could use e-mail and other internet functions on the iPod, but could I use Safari? No I could not!

In the end, I worked out that if I managed to stop the Cloud page from loading, I could get Safari working again.

It was a really weird error that would not be resolved easily, but at least I resolved it without needing to restore the iPod which is where I was going.

May 15, 2008

PDFs (well Acrobat) crashing Safari

Having a few issues since I had my MacBook Pro upgraded to Leopard with the way in which Acrobat interacts with Safari.

Everytime I try and open a PDF from Safari, it crashes…

error message…

It appears to be related to Acrobat, specifically, the AdobeSelfHealing plug-in!

Solution delete the Adobe PDF plug-in hopefully. Though this does mean Safari will use Preview instead of Acrobat.

December 16, 2007

EyeTV Wireless Access

One of the features of EyeTV during a recent update (version 2.5) was the ability to stream recordings wirelessly to an iPhone or an iPod touch.

As at the time I had neither I didn’t either turn it on or check it out.

Now having an iPod touch I gave it a go and was well impressed. It’s simple to turn on, just go to the relevant section in the EyeTV preferences.

EyeTV Wireless Access Preferences

Now what I didn’t realise was that basically what EyeTV does is convert the videos into a format which plays on the iPod touch, but hosts it on the Mac with the EyeTV with a webpage as a front end.

Now that webpage can be viewed on your iPod touch (or iPhone), but also can be viewed on a Mac which is using Safari 3 (the page does not work on Safari 2).

EyeTV Wireless Access on Safari 3

You can also use Firefox (2.0.0.7) or Camino (1.5.1), clicking on the links plays (streams) the file in Quicktime.

The file plays fine over an 802.11g network.

However it also works on a Windows PC as well, it worked fine on my Windows XP Tablet using Firefox, however it didn’t work on Internet Explorer 6 or on a Vista PC with Internet Explorer 7. Obviously you also need to have Quicktime installed on the PC. Quite a useful way of streaming video across a home network.

December 2, 2007

Duplicate Bookmarks

For some reason when my iMac today synced my bookmarks (via .mac) it added all my bookmarks again to Safari, so I had duplicates of every bookmark both on the menu bar and in the bookmarks themselves.

No idea why .mac decided that I needed to add all my bookmarks again.

This is (I have found) one of the problems with maintaining multiple bookmarks across computers.

I can add a bookmark on the iMac, it will sync, be added to my .mac bookmarks and then be synced to the PowerBook. As it should be.

But there have been times when I have changed as in updated a bookmark on the PowerBook and in theory this should update back, but I have found later that .mac has synced the old book mark back again.

Though what happened today is very weird. I will probably need to do a manual sync to replace all the duplicated bookmarks with a single copy from .mac.