Apr 27 2009
Safari Clones and Mobile Safari Tricks
Safari Clones
Safari is a pretty good browser, and with WebKit built in to OS X the rendering is fast. While Safari can be customized, it’s always nice to have alternatives.
Shiira is probably one of the oldest and most advanced of the Safari clones. In version 2, Shiira added HUD style widgety windows and a “page dock” at the bottom that replaces tabs.

Shiira requires Tiger and includes a mini companion: a browsing widget for Dashboard. Shiira can even take advantage of Safari 3′s new version of WebKit. This Safari alternative has an original interface and cool features, check it out.
With version 2, Shiira picked up some new features, but also some weight. In the spirit of a true Open Source project, Shiira 1 was brought back to life as Demeter.

Demeter includes the 1.2 features of Shiira and is gaining a few features of its own. If you don’t mind the icon, it is a very fast clone of a clone of Safari and includes an iTunes remote and all the goodies of Safari 3 (DOM inspector, spell check, resizable text boxes).
Mobile Safari Bookmarks
Thanks to near-forgotten browser novelties, you can search your favorite sites more quickly and store documents and web pages for offline use on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Search Bookmarklets
These bookmarks launch a pop-up dialog for searching frequently visited sites. Magnesium Studios has a set of ‘Springlets’ that you can add to your Home screen.

If you’re on your iPhone, use this link to add quick search links for Wikipedia, IMDB and more. If you’re more the home-brew type, check out the Wikipedia search bookmarklet here.
Data Bookmarks
Thanks to a little-know feature of just about any browser but IE, encoded data can be stored in a URL, and thereby a bookmark. This means a bookmark can be created that actually includes the contents of a web page – including images – that can be viewed offline. What’s more, you can even encode another browser-readable file like a PDF. iWebSaver will grab and encode a website for offline browsing on your iPhone or touch.

If you’d like to encode files, head back over to Magnesium Studios for Filemark Maker. Drag files to this tiny Mac app and it will encode them into a bookmark-able page that you can sync with mobile Safari via iTunes.






Number 1: Time Capsule