yjsoon

Thanks to Nigel, I managed to get OS X Tiger pretty early (an hour after its launch — the amount of time to get from campus to SF). Set it to Archive and Install, then went out for the night and it was nice and installed by the time I got back (at 2am, stuffed full of In-N-Out, desperately needing sleep but unable to resist the urge to tinker with the new OS).

While trying things out in Tiger, I noticed a couple of nice changes in Safari RSS, and hacked something up to get it to behave. Thought I’d share them.

First, Safari now seems to support Cmd-Opt-Arrow for switching between tabs, in addition to Cmd-Shift-Arrow. At least, this seems to be the case, since my user-defined Cmd-Opt-Arrow shortcuts in the keyboard shortcut preference panes are gone, yet the shortcut still works. A spillover from my previous install, perhaps?

Second, and this one I thoroughly approve: double-clicking in the empty tab bar in Safari now creates a new tab, a la Firefox. Yay! I’d been wanting this feature forever.

Finally, and this one’s a bit complicated: Even though Safari RSS has actual “customisable” toolbar icons now (right click, customise instead of changing from the menu), it’s still lacking a “New Tab” button. Unfortunately, the old tip I’d used on how to make the “Add Bookmark” button into a “New Tab” button didn’t work any more, because of the new toolbar architecture.

This is how to fix it (disclaimer: the method here worked for me and I make no guarantees that it’ll work for you, even if it should. Don’t blame me if your shiny new OS X goes to bits because of this):

1. Backup Safari.
2. Install Xcode (from the OS X DVD). A bit overkill for that one button, yes*.
3. Open Safari’s package contents (right-click, show package contents)
4. Navigate into Contents, Resources, English.lproj
5. Open ToolbarItems.nib (double clicking should open with Interface Builder)
6. In the “ToolbarItems.nib (English)” window, double click on “First Responder”
7. Press Cmd-Shift-I to bring up the Inspector window, if it’s not already open
8. In the Inspector window, press Cmd-1 to make sure you’re looking at “Attributes”. Click on Add, and create a new item called “newTab” (without quotes)
9. In the “Toolbar Items” window, click on one of the “torn pictures” and press Cmd-Shift-I to bring up the Inspector window if it’s not already open
10. Select the one nearest the address bar (this should correspond to the placement in the “customise toolbar” menu), this is the “Add Bookmark” button
11. Press Cmd-2 or choose “Connections”. Select “newTab” and click “Change Action” or simply double-click on it; there should be a round pushbutton icon next to it now.
12. Save, quit and test.
13. If it works, yay! If not, ummm, it wasn’t my fault. I hope you remembered step 1.

• I suppose I could email you the changed file if you wanted. No guarantees it’ll work, of course.

Everyone else who reads this blog and doesn’t share my childish glee about installing the new OS X: I’ll write about my trip soon, really…