Double Parity

1. Safari

Many Mac users prefer Safari to Firefox and I don’t blame them. Even after the switch to Intel, Firefox runs more sluggishly on a Mac relative to Windows. But while Safari is pretty fast, it is also pretty bare-bones – no extensions, no keywords. Thank goodness for Input Managers.

Input Managers are a feature of OS X that allows users to extend the features of applications at runtime. Because Safari lacks a plug-in architecture, many developers instead use Input Managers to add features to the Apple browser.

Of particular significance for us is Sogudi by Kitzel Hoover. Sogudi adds keywords to Safari, allowing you to construct Recent Search shortcuts like the one described in my previous post. The only difference is that the “%s” in the url is replaced by “@@@”.

Sogudi comes with a number of pre-installed shortcuts, including ones for Google Image Search, Wikipedia, and IMDB. It’s a fantastic utility. Sadly, there are strong rumors that Input Managers will be disabled in Leopard, potentially orphaning a number of useful tools.

2. Quicksilver

While Sogudi saves you a couple of steps, you need to have Safari open. If it’s not, you must first launch Safari before entering your search terms. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way to open Safari and run a search all in one step? Well, with Quicksilver there is!

For this shortcut to work, you need to first enable the Safari Module and the Web Search Module plug-ins in Quicksilver. Then, in Safari, bookmark the Recent Search URL, but replace “%s” with “***” (3 asterisks).

Give the bookmark a short name and now it’s available from Quicksilver. Just activate Quicksilver, type the bookmark name, hit tab twice, and enter in your search terms:

Enjoy!