When I search the web for something, it’s mostly about music and artist discographies. Therefore I am used to the following typing workflow: “cmd+L” for toggling the URL bar, “en” to bring up the Wikipedia bookmark, open the site, and search there. I’ve often wished for a simpler key combination for quick access to such searches. Earlier this year I reviewed Bang On for iOS – a small app for easy website search on the iPhone and iPad. Using “!” as a toggling prefix you could create search commands for any website you can imagine, from Wikipedia to Amazon. It worked pretty well. I really wished for a similar functionality on the Mac.

Now, Safari users can have exactly this feature through a new extension called Omnikey, developed by Mario Estrada. Install it, and afterwards you’ll just need to type “wiki [search query]” into the Safari address bar to automatically open up the search results to your query on Wikipedia.org.

The “wiki” is the “omnikey” for toggling this kind of search. The same system also works for YouTube, Amazon, and some other websites out of the box. Put a “!” in front of your URL bar search query and Safari will use the default Google search. You can also easily add new websites you want quick Omnikey search for: just open up the extension’s editing panel in the toolbar, click “Add Site”, select a key for toggling the site search and paste a dedicated search query URL into the panel. Now you just have to replace the search query in the URL with a “{search}“ wildcard (like a software placeholder) and you’re done. I tried it with the MacStories search powered by DuckDuckGo, and it immediately worked.

Omnikey is a very handy Safari extension. It is lightweight, fast, and easy to use. Setting up new search keys is easy and works flawlessly. For people like me, who often need to search specific websites for links and information, Omnikey is a great companion. Download it for free at the project’s GitHub page.

Earlier this week, Pocket updated its ultra-handy bookmarklet and Chrome extension by adding tags after you’ve saved something. Along with this, the Chrome extension also received a useful shortcut (OS X: CMD+Shift+P, Windows: Ctrl+Shift+P) for even quicker saving.

This morning as I was drinking my coffee and reading my RSS/Twitter news I updated the Chrome extension, and then tried the new key combo… and tried… and tried. The only thing Chrome was doing was bringing up the Print Preview dialog box. Upon searching some Google Groups pages, I found an easy fix to disable the Print Preview box and let Pocket use its new shortcut as intended.
Directions: Type ‘about:flags’ in Chrome’s address bar and locate the ‘Disable Print Preview’ option. Click the underlined ‘Enable’ to disable Chrome’s print preview, then restart Chrome. Now CMD+Shift+P (OS X) or Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows) should activate the Pocket key command. Personally, I’d love for Pocket to add user-customizable shortcuts, so that users will have the option to use something else besides the default command to avoid this problem entirely.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out Pocket yet, read our review.

Screen Sharing is a feature built into Mac OS X for remotely controlling another computer through the use of virtual network computing (VNC). Apple’s native screen sharing client is buried in the operating system making it nearly impossible to find the app when you actually need it. On top of that, it really lacks basic features like being able to store a connection for future use. Due to these shortcomings, most people turn to third party applications for managing their VNC connections. A quick search in the Mac App Store will turn up some pretty great options including Edovia’s Screens. Although apps like these work extremely well, not everyone wants to spend that much to easily connect to a remote computer. This is why I created the Screen Sharing for Alfred extension. I wanted Alfred to be able to function as my VNC client and really extend the functionality of the Apple’s native Screen Sharing app.

Screen Sharing for Alfred adds the ability to store information about VNC connections and quickly access them with a simple keyboard command. It is written in a beautiful fusion of shell scripting and AppleScript so it is fast, efficient, and capable of interacting with the user through AppleScript’s GUI prompts. It also incorporates David Ferguson’s genius Extension Updater system in case any new features are added in the future. For those unfamiliar with Updater, it is an extension for Alfred that allows developers to make bug fixes and add new features to released extensions – then when users run Updater, it will download the latest version of any extensions that have updates available. (more…)

While many are still wishfully hoping Twitter will update its official Mac and iOS client with support for Manton Reece’s excellent Tweet Marker service, the reality is third-party developers are once again leapfrogging Twitter in terms of innovation, experimentation, and willingness to improve existing solutions with new techniques and add-ons. Such is Tweet Marker, a web service for syncing timelines across Twitter clients. By implementing the service’s free API, clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot have gained the capability of syncing the “last read” tweet in user timelines and mentions, with lists and direct messages soon to be supported as well. You can read more about how Tweet Marker actually works in our previous Twitterrific 4.3 and Tweetbot 1.6 coverage.

WebMarker is a new Chrome extension that brings Tweet Marker integration on Twitter.com. Whereas many may quickly dismiss this extension because “really, no one uses Twitter’s website anymore these days”, I believe that’s not the case. Twitter.com still provides a great alternative to desktop clients in some specific scenarios — MacStories’ favorite deals hunter Chris, for instance, is forced to use a Windows PC at work, and he prefers to use Twitter.com rather than a third-party Windows client. Wouldn’t it be great if all office workers could sync their Twitter status while at work, and come back home to find their Tweetbots and Twitterrifics ready to pick up where they left off?

Being a Chrome extension, WebMarker works on any platform Google’s browser is available on. Once installed, the app will redirect you to Twitter.com for OAuth access (good choice), then it’ll sit in Chrome’s Omnibar, waiting for you to visit Twitter.com. Here’s how it works:

When you open Twitter or refresh your open page you should see the app icon right in the Omnibar. If it’s colored, a click will scroll you down to the last marked tweet. If it’s gray it scrolls to bottom to let Twitter load more tweets until the marked tweet is found (for a maximum of 3 trys).

Current tweet reading position will be set if page is in idle, or tab is inactive, for at least 10 seconds.

I tested WebMarker on Google Chrome Canary for the Mac, and it worked as expected. I was able to sync my “last read tweet” back to Twitterrific and Tweetbot once Chrome’s tab became idle, and the extension’s icon in the Omnibar allowed me to quickly jump back to Tweet Marker’s synced status with ease.

WebMarker is a nice addition to Tweet Marker’s growing ecosystem, and a useful way to keep your timelines in sync if you happen to use Twitter.com in your daily workflow. Download it here.

As an avid reader of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, Ben Brooks and Shawn Blanc, I often find myself scrolling entire articles to reach the end and read the footnotes the authors decided to include. Anchor-linked footnotes are often used online as an alternative to the more classic parenthesis to elaborate on thoughts or data that won’t fit the main article’s body, but are still relevant to its context. Because I want to know immediately what these guys are referring to with a footnote, and because the only way to read footnotes is by interrupting the flow of an article and manually “jumping” to them, I’m forced to click on an anchor-linked note, read it, and scroll back to where I left off.

Footnotify, an extension for Safari and Google Chrome, makes the entire process of quickly reading footnotes faster, more intuitive and good-looking by displaying a footnote inside a popover that will overlay the page you’re reading without automatically scrolling to the end of the article, thus “disrupting” your reading flow. Once installed, Footnotify will fade in footnotes keeping the original style of the website, allowing you to click outside the popover to dismiss a footnote.

Footnotify can be downloaded over at Ideon Open Ideas, and it worked very well with every website from my RSS subscription list that used footnotes in blog posts. You can try it now here, or here.

Ever since the release of OS X Lion and Safari 5.1, the Agile Bits team has been busy updating its 1Password Safari extension to work with the new OS and the updated version of the browser, which brings major changes both on Snow Leopard and Lion. Whilst initial Lion support (alongside Firefox 5 and Fluid 1.0 compatibility) was rolled out on June 20, Agile Bits spent the last month releasing new public and beta versions of 1Password for Mac, tweaking its extension engine and re-implementing features requested by their customers in an attempt to bring old functionalities back to Lion and Safari 5.1. First came support for Safari 5.1 on Snow Leopard (which has less features than its Lion counterpart, but still is a major upgrade from Safari 5.0), then Agile Bits released 1Password 3.7 for Mac through the public beta channel, adding features like copy to clipboard from the extension, universal unlock (if 1Password is already unlocked, so is the Safari extension), improved Auto Submit and a bunch of other changes and optimizations throughout the app and extension. You can read more about 3.7 beta here.

In the meantime though, Agile Bits was working on a complete redesign for the Safari extension, teased on the developer’s blog exactly a week ago. The new extension is now live, and as usual it needs to be installed from 1Password’s desktop Preferences panel (more information here). (more…)

Based on the Pure Reader mod for Google Reader we covered back in December, 3 Column Reader is a new Safari extension released in June and updated last week that enables you to turn the Google Reader website into a beautiful, three-column reading experience for your RSS feeds. Developed by Zackary Corbett, 3 Column Reader is only compatible with Safari for now, and it’s got a minor glitch with the settings icon from Google’s new sharing toolbar launched alongside the Plus social network. However, the extension is being actively developed so we wouldn’t be surprised to see a fix for users logged into Google+ soon.

For everything else, 3 Column Reader looks great: the extension takes Pure Reader’s color scheme (which reminds us of Reeder’s sepia background and monochrome icons) to lay out a three-column setup perfect for widescreen monitors: folders and feeds are listed on the left, a mid panel visualizes the feeds’ titles and excerpts, and the full articles with images are displayed on the right. You can hide the source list by hitting an icon in the mid panel, and most of Google Reader’s web app functionalities are retained, such as popup menus to sort articles, or buttons to mark items as favorite. I didn’t encounter any other compatibility issues when using 3 Column Reader on Safari 5.1 for Lion GM. (more…)

Evernote, the digital capture tool that allows you to save anything from the web and access it from a variety of devices and computers including iPhones and Macs, announced earlier today an updated version of the popular Chrome extension that, following the recent interface changes to the iPhone app, offers a more elegant way to clip content from webpages and have it synchronized with your Evernote account.

The new extension, available here, packs a whole new UI with slick buttons and text entry fields for quick tag and note input, but more importantly adds a new Article Clip feature that, with just one click on the browser’s toolbar, automatically selects the main content of an article to save it as full-text in Evernote. The extension worked perfectly with all the blogs I’ve visited today, and the new extension window makes it easy to edit the title, tags, notes and notebook. If you feel like you don’t want to clip the whole article, but only a portion, the extension is also capable of recognizing a selection and enable you to switch between that and the full article from a dropdown menu. The same menu is also being used to only clip a page’s direct URL, if you prefer to bookmark stuff, rather than archive it as a text document. (more…)

Two weeks ago I realized I needed a way to send a webpage not only from my Mac browser to an iOS device, but from the iPhone or iPad to my Mac browser as well. The reason is simple: I find an interesting link on my iPhone I don’t want to bookmark or Instapaper, yet I want to simply check out later on the desktop. There’s no easy way to do it. So with the help from a friend and support from my Twitter followers, I created a folder action script for OS X that receives links shared from iOS through Dropbox and opens them in a new tab in the system’s browser. The method still works for me and it’s a really easy (yet powerful) way to save just about any link for later desktop usage, but I saw many had trouble trying to make the script work or integrate it with Dropbox. So here comes an app for that. (more…)