Here is a quick video showing a few tips for using Safari. I show you how to turn on the status bar, create custom bookmarks, and a few handy keyboard shortcuts. I also talk about some social media plugins, you can that that post here: Social Media tools for safari

What tricks do you employ with safari?

Quick Tip: Safari Tricks is a post from: The Custom Mac

The Menu Bar can be a powerful tool and resource for every Mac. Here are 10 of what we think to be the best free Menu Bar applications out there. We would also like to hear which menu bar apps do you use/love?

WeatherBug Alert | Download

WeatherBug Alert for Mac helps you plan your day with confidence by putting severe weather alerts and your live temperature on your desktop in the menu bar.

Alarm Clock | Download

Alarm Clock is a lightweight application for setting iTunes alarms, timers, stopwatches and much more. Automatically wakes up your Mac and offers a slow-wake mode. This one is a must have.

Ejector | Download

Ejector adds an Eject icon to the Mac OS X menu bar. Great for people dealing with multiple disks, such as iPods, CDs, DVDs, USB drives, .dmg’s or hard disks. You can then safely disconnect them from your Mac.

SoundSource | Download

SoundSource is a tiny tool for OS X enabling you to switch your audio input and output sources with a single click, and even adjust their volume settings.

SpiritedAway | Download

Spirited Away checks each running application’s activity, and if an application isn’t active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away.

ByteController | Download

ByteController is a small user interface utility for controlling iTunes. ByteController gives you three buttons in your menu bar: Previous Song, Next Song and Play/Pause. Holding the Previous Song and Next Song buttons plays fast forward or rewinds.

ByteController supports hot keys and Growl.

iStat | Download

With 8 separate and highly configurable menu extras, iStat menus will let you know exactly what’s going on inside your Mac.

Deviant | Download

Deviant is a menu extra that allows you to link the current desktop to any folder, effectively swapping the items on your desktop.

Nocture | Download

Nocturne is a simple app for switching a computer to night vision mode, and much more.

MenuPrefs | Download

Hate having to go through two to three steps to change your Mac’s Energy Saver preferences? You can rest easy now, thanks to MenuPrefs. MenuPrefs provides a fast access to Mac OS X’s individual System Preference Panes.

Remember to let us know what application you think should be on this list.

The 10 Best Free Menu Bar Applications for the Mac is a post from: The Custom Mac

For those of us who prefer Safari over FireFox as our web browser here is a list of hard to find Social Media resources for Safari.

StumbleUpon

No more need to use the FireFox plugin. Just add this link to your bookmarks bar.

Delicious

There are Delicious plug-ins available for FireFox & IE but not Safari. Delicious Safari is an excellent plug-in and lets you create and view Del.icio.us bookmarks from the Safari menu bar.

Twitter

There is a beautiful little plugin for Safari using Twitter’ers called Safari140 Making it simple clean and easy to tweet stories, videos and websites.

Digg

Simple clean bookmarklet for digg users. Pick yours up here.
Oh yeah, and you should digg this post from the bottom of this page

Share This

Another great tool for Safari is the Share this Bookmarklet. This enables you to share the current page with almost every social media and sharing site. Get yours here.

Social Media tools for safari is a post from: The Custom Mac

UPDATE (6-10-2009) Safari 4 have been updated for Snow Leopard and no longer has the tabs on the top.

Safari 4 Has some problems. We know this but at the same time Safari 4 offers us some more speed and flexibility. So rather than go back to previous versions here are 3 ways to bring back functionality from v3 but keep the speed and search-ability of v4.

Resources Mentioned in Video: Safari 4 Buddy – Free application Secret Safari 4 Menu – Menu File for Safari 4   Terminal Commands: 1. Move Tabs to bottom

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

2. Loading Bars & Circle When both set to NO it restores the blue loading bar behind the URL. Also puts a page loading spinner in the tab itself, which looks odd with the new tabs:
 

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO

        3. Switch off the new URL autocomplete menu and go back to the original one

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList -bool NO

4. Turn off the new Google suggest menu

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest -bool NO

5. Remove CoverFlow from the Bookmarks view entirely        

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView -bool NO

        6. Disable the dimming when clicking on a Top Site

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot -bool NO

7. Disable Top Sites feature completely

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool NO

8. Undoing changes Just run the defaults command with the delete flag for the appropriate key you wish to delete.

$ defaults delete com.apple.Safari <key>

Video: Restoring Safari 4 Using Custom Hidden Settings is a post from: The Custom Mac

Apple’s Address Book is one of those things that gets used but is rarely a heavily use app. But here are a few plugins that will change the way you look at and use this little application.

Google Maps With Contacts (Google Maps for Address Book)

This great plug-in enables you to see addresses in Google Maps and to request directions to a particular address.
After installation the options are available in the Contextual Menu when you click on any Address Book address tab.

Importing FaceBook Contacts (Address Book Sync)

AddressBookSync is a free Mac OS X application to download profile pictures and other Facebook data to Address Book cards. This is a handy tool to keep your contacts’ pictures and birthdays updated if you have numerous Facebook friends in your Mac OS X Address Book.

Show All Emails From Contact (“Show Email From” Script)

Address Book plugin that quickly finds and lists in Mail.app all the emails you have received from a particular email address.
After installing it with the instructions on the script writers site, clicking and holding the cursor over an email label in Address Book gives you a “Show Emails from” option.

What Plug-ions do you use?

Any favorite plug-ins that you use, love and would like to share? Be sure to let us know!

Dressing up Apple’s Address Book With Plugins is a post from: The Custom Mac

Did you ever try to use Quick Look on a zip file? Yeah it doesn’t work. Luckily there is a outstanding free plugin that can take care of this minor but incredibly annoying problem.

Zip Quick Look makes it possible to view a zipped archieved file’s contents using Quick Look. To install Just download the plug-in, drag it to /Library/QuickLook/(Create one if you don’t have it) and then restart Finder (right-click Finder in the Dock while holding the Option key and select Relaunch). Now when you Quick Look a zipped archive you should see the file’s contents.

Before and after installing Zip Quick Look:

Viewing Content of Zip Files with Zip Quick Look is a post from: The Custom Mac