Wednesday, July 28, 2010

What's Useful in the Safari Extensions Gallery

Friendly Computers would like to help you to choose some useful Safari Extensions.

Safari's Extensions Gallery has gone live, and there's quite a bit to look through and add to your browser at launch. We took a gander through the offerings and picked out some of the extensions worth noting. Here's the list.

To use these extensions, you'll need to have Safari installed, and have it updated to the latest version. Both Macs and Windows installations have Apple's updating software you can use to grab the 5.0.1 copy, but if you've disabled Apple's Software Update on Windows, you'll need to grab a fresh copy manually.

We've provided links to the extension maker and a direct installation link for each extension we picked out, with each link coming from the extension maker. You may be asked whether you want to Open or Save the file we're linking to (choose "Open"), and if you're sure you want to install that extension ("Install," we presume). To manage these extensions once you've got them installed, head to your Safari preferences and look for the newly-enabled Extensions menu.

Social Networking

What's Useful in the Safari Extensions GalleryBetter Facebook: Automatically hides posts you've already read, removes some of the cruft from the site, notifies you of new comments and un-friendings, and more. [Install in Safari]

Shut Up: Kills comments on many sites where you might get sick of them. [Install in Safari]

Bookmarking

Procrastinate: Adds text articles to bookmarking and reading services like Instapaper, Read it Later, and Delicious from an all-in-one toolbar button. [Install in Safari]

Twitter Tools

What's Useful in the Safari Extensions Gallery
Twitter for Safari: Twitter's official client for sending tweets, but also reading tweets and seeing Twitter profiles related to the page you're on. You can easily tweet about a page you're looking at, too, with a pre-shortened URL. [Install in Safari]

E-mail

GmailThis: Sends an email through Gmail's compose window, with the page you're on pre-loaded in the subject and body text. Basically, a fancy bookmarklet, but with a nice button. [Install in Safari]

What's Useful in the Safari Extensions GalleryTrueNew Count for Gmail and Google Apps: More than just providing a count of the messages marked unread, TrueNew's counter shows you how many messages are unread since the last time you looked at Gmail or Google Apps. [Install in Safari]

Shopping

InvisibleHand: Like the Firefox and (slightly scandalous) Chrome extensions, InvisibleHand checks the shopping item pages you're looking at to see if the item is offered elsewhere—Amazon, Buy.com, and the like—at a cheaper price. [Install in Safari]

Entertainment

A Cleaner YouTube: Claims to transform YouTube into a "quiet and peaceful place" by cutting out most of everything except the video itself. [Install in Safari]

Turn Off the Lights: As with its nifty Chrome counterpart, this little button throws a shade over everything except the video you're watching on YouTube, Vimeo, or embedded clips. [Install in Safari]

Security

What's Useful in the Safari Extensions Gallery
LastPass: One of our favorite universal password systems, LastPass is an elegant little plug-in for storing your passwords, filling them in automatically, and yet keeping them encrypted and available anywhere you go. [Install in Safari]

Web of Trust: Reads out everything the very excellent Web of Trust community knows about the site you're on—encryption, trustworthiness, vendor reliability for various components, and so on. [Install in Safari]

Photos

Awesome Screenshot: Like its Chrome counterpart, Awesome Screenshot handles the capture, annotation, sensitive data blurring, and upload/sharing aspects of grabbing web pages, no extra software needed. [Install in Safari]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5598524/whats-useful-in-the-safari-extensions-gallery