I’m one of those 300+ Features!

Now that Leopard has shipped, I suppose I can finally point to one thing that I had something to do with in Leopard. If you go to the Leopard Features Page and scroll down to the Safari section, you’ll see that it has 13 features. This one

was based on some work I did about two years ago in Safari, because I wanted to be able to re-find stuff I’d seen on the web recently so I could show it to folks, but I’d forgotten exactly where I saw it. I could remember what it was, just not where.

Here’s an example. Last week I read a recommendation for Bananas Foster that I wanted to try to make sometime at home. Now, a week or so later, I’m at home, and want to do it, but I don’t remember where I found this particular recipe. I could go back to Google and type “bananas foster” in again, and then hope that it finds the same one I found last week, but I came across that one while reading a webpage linked off a blog that someone emailed me, and I don’t remember any of the details, so the odds of Google finding that same one are pretty low. I What can I do?

Well, my computer knows where I’ve been lately — it keeps the history of all of the urls. But, that isn’t terribly helpful, since I don’t remember what site it was on and I don’t pay attention to page titles. I suppose I could flit thru the history of everywhere I was in the last week, but that’s a couple hundred pages and it’s not fun to do.

Why can’t my computer keep track of the stuff on the pages that I go to, so I can search that later? Well, Safari in Leopard does that, and it lets you do full text searches of your browsing history to help narrow down what you’ve seen before.

So, how do you use it? Easy. In Safari, go to the History window by selecting “Show all history” from the History menu. Now, in the upper right of the window is a search box type some text from the webpage you’re trying to find — “bananas foster”, in my case. Safari will now show you all the pages you’ve been to recently that have that text on them.

In my case, the recipe I was looking for was this one. I’ve made them; they are quite yummy although I always seem to have too much syrup for the quantity of bananas.

I also contributed in some way to “Full Unicode Support in AppleScript”, fixed some bugs and performance tweaks in Mail, provided some of the support that the new Parental Controls needed to enforce limits of certain kinds, made it possible for application launches to be halted while the system warns you that the app was downloaded and verifies that you do want to run it, provided some of the underpinnings for Spaces to work, updated a bunch of things to be fully 64 bit capable, and fixed a bunch of bugs in lots of places.