Although my first computer was a Univac 1004 and my second an RCA Spectra 70, I’m no technogeek, consumed by the process, the little internal whirs and splats that make computers do whatever the hell it is they do. I’m only interested in what they do for ME, and after downloading Safari 5 this morning, I’m having trouble remembering anything computery that did more to Ease the Burden in recent times, except, perhaps, Scrivener.
Because Safari 5 has a magic new button called Reader, and what it does is beautifully imitate Scrivener’s full-screen mode. Reading a long, multipage article on the Web filled with advertisements for cars you’d never buy and work at home scams and weightloss schemes that destroy your liver and insurance products crafted by felons? Press the Reader button, and all the dross goes away, and you get a black screen with a nice white window in the center, and all the article–all the pages of the article–nicely flowing along in big clear, easily read, non-distracting type.
Press Reader again, and back comes the same article, complete with multiple pages to be laboriously loaded, and endless advertisements for instantly winning $5 million, and click here to compare your insurance provider against the one under Federal indictment.
There are only a few little buttons on a fade-up menu that appears when you hover near the bottom (again, like Scrivener in full-screen mode): Enlarge, Shrink, Email, Print, and Exit.
Reader is, as we say in Maine, slicker’n a cuppa custard.
That’s wonderful! It sounds a lot like the Readable (?) JavaScript applet I’ve had installed in Firefox all this time, except the one I have just cleans up the current page—it doesn’t gather multiple sequential pages together into a single session. That’s very nice. I’ve always hated how sites do that, and often just read articles using the Print feature (cancelling the print dialogue when it appears).
There’s a thread on Cocoaforge Adium list by someone who installed Safari 5, but Adium crashed whenever it was running. It turned out it was some kind of HUD extension he had installed in Adium that was conflicting with Safari 5. A space to be watched in terms of HUD using apps, perhaps.
That’s true, but the poster in question found that deleting his HUD extension cured the crash. Would a HUD on Adium use WebKit? It’s beyond by limited tech-ability.
Mind you, the Reader button might just wean me away from OmniWeb for some sites.
Mark
PS I have had Safari 5 and Adium running together without problem … but then I don’t have anything like a HUD or any fancy extensions to either Adium or Safari.
I have a user who is having Scrivener, Keynote and TeXShop all crash with the same problem after installing Safari 5 - I’m still trying to troubleshoot the problem, so if anyone has spotted any other Safari 5-related crashes reportedly affecting other apps, please let me know.
As for Reader mode - very nice! It’s a shame it doesn’t seem to work with too many pages, but for the ones it does work with, it’s great.
Loading Scrivener when Safari 5 is running on my MBP doesn’t crash Scriv, though these days, I use it much more often on the MBA and I haven’t yet installed Saf. 5 on the MBA. I’ll let you know if I run into any difficulties, but then, even though I use it every day, I don’t think I use many of Scriv’s facilities compared with the majority of people here.
Does anyone know where Safari 5 puts the new extensions? Logically it would be in a folder called ‘Safari Extensions’ but I can’t find one, or anything that looks as though it might be the correct location.
I don’t use extensions, as far as I know, but Scriv hasn’t crashed while running Safari 5 so far, and I’ve done a fair amount of industrial-grade pasting of Web research from a Reader window straight into Scrivener. Gives a nice clean page with all the links intact and none of the hair-loss advertisements.