![[The Saft icon, a flat-screen iMac showing the Safari logo on its screen]](/log/img/200404/saft.gif)
Saft is a Safari plugin that allows true full-screen browsing, kiosk mode, and type-ahead searching familiar to the Mozilla family. I gave Saft a whirl after reading a glowing review from Jon Hicks about a month ago. I’m quickly realizing the full-screen mode of Saft is handy when giving HTML/CSS-based presentations. I’ve been using Firefox and a fullscreen bookmarklet for my presentations, but some of the browser chrome and the menu bar still show when using that method. With Saft’s full-screen mode, the only piece of the browser still visible is the scroll bar, and that’s only if it’s needed.
While poking around within Safari a couple weeks ago, I accidently discovered a little-talked-about feature of Saft. One which annoyed me greatly until I figured out what was going on.
Holding down the Ctrl-key, then clicking is normally a way to invoke contextual menus in the Mac OS. But with Saft installed, within Safari, if you hold down the Ctrl-key, then begin dragging via the trackpad (or a mouse), the cursor will turn into a hand (minus the raised index finger), and you can drag-scroll a web page as far as your cursor can go in any direction. No need to click anything. Works for vertical or horizontal scrolling, or both in cases where you want to scroll diagonally. And it’s incredibly fast.
I doubt I would have noticed the feature while using a mouse. But when I’m out of the office, with only the trackpad and a single-button on my PowerBook, I often use the Ctrl-key to access contextual menus. I realized the page would scroll in Safari with the slightest touch of the track pad. I didn’t connect this with my install of the Saft plugin until after doing more research. For a few days, I thought it was a new, undocumented feature of Safari.
Small discovery? Yes, very much so. (Windows users are thinking, “Typical of these Mac fanatics to hype on a small feature.” That’s fine. Sometimes we do.) If you’re an experienced Adobe user, dragging to reposition a window (normally using the spacebar to temporarily bring up the hand tool) is a common occurrence, and very handy for quickly moving around the canvas. While writing this entry, I was also reminded this functionality exists (and has existed for a while) in IE5/Mac if you hold down the Command-key, then click and drag. With Safari/Saft, no need to click. It’s especially useful if you only want to reposition the window just a slight amount, or want to scroll a screen-length faster than the arrow keys will let you scroll. It’s faster than pushing the cursor over to the srollbar area, or moving your right hand to the arrow keys.
Unfortunately, the latest version of Saft (the one that works in Panther with Safari 1.2) is shareware, and will nag you with a Thank You screen every time you start up Safari until you pay for a non-demo version. The demo may be limited in more ways, but I can’t remember now that I’ve paid for it. The $10 fee won’t be worth it for casual surfers. Would I have paid for drag-scrolling? Of course not. It’s a bonus. But if you’re a heavy Safari user, and really want some of Saft’s features, as Jon said, the fee is “a pittance for functionality that I would enjoy every day.” Thanks for the tip, Jon.
Update: Hao Li, creator of Saft, just released v6.5.5, which adds an option in the preferences to enable/disable “control-drag”, which is probably why I never knew it was part of Saft until accidentally discovering it. If you don’t like the control-drag behavior, you can now easily disable it.
29 comments (Comments closed)
MyIE2 for Windows has both Full-Screen and auto-scrolling. It’s even better than that, since Macs don’t have real mouses.
Therefore, Windows and IE are clearly superior. Right?
I never understood why Apple never released a “pro” version of their sexy crystal mouse. That’s probably one of the only things that bothers me about Mac, the windows intellimouse comes with up to 5 buttons, plus the scroll wheel can be pressed for an added bonus. This is a common mouse to get when buying a PC workstation. For browsing it’s the most useful thing in the world, the side buttons navigate back and forth between pages, the scroll wheel — well — scrolls the page, and in mozilla you can program the middle scroll click to open a link in either a new window or a tab. I realize that this mouse is compatible with Macs, but its just sooo not the design caliber as a power book or a G5. I would so like to see Apple’s version of a similar product. It would rock with style.
We all know which is the superior platform of them all.
There are some nice trackpad enhancements for OS X if you want easier scrolling, too. I really like uControl, which can turn the trackpad into a scrollwheel (vertical and/or horizontal) while you hold down the fn key (or a key of your choosing). It quickly becomes second nature.
Good point Chris Z. It’s been a long-time critique of Apple hardware. It keeps the experience simple, but the one-button mouse and trackpad are outdated, and are certainly less usable for almost anyone with prior computing experience. I’m sure Apple designers have created multi-button mouse prototypes in the past, but for whatever reason, they’ve never seen the light of day. Hopefully, that will change at some point in the future, ‘cause I agree, I’m sure they’d be nice.
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By the way, as the comment notes state below, if you take the time to add a comment, please keep it relevant and constructive. I don’t mind opposing views and debates, but comments which don’t add anything to the conversation won’t stay up for long.
The Finder actually has this feature… I seem to remember holding down command and dragging would perform this hand-scroll, but in Panther you hold down command-option and click-drag in the background of a finder window to hand-scroll it.
Not sure when they changed it, or if it’s always been like this and age is catching up to my memory.
Mark, that’s really cool. I wonder why Safari doesn’t use it?
Like Brian I use uControl for scrolling, but its search bar additions and ability to save complete windows that I particularly loved about Saft. I’m just glad someone else thought it was worth the money too.
FYO, this extension (http://www.krickelkrackel.de/autohide.htm) provides an easy true full screen mode to Firefox.
I use FireFox 0.8, and you can hide the chrome at the top by before going to full screen mode, goto View > Toolbars > and uncheck the navigation and bookmarks toolbars. Now in full screen mode, there are no tool bars, just the scroll bars. I am on a Windows box with XP if that matters.
Is anyone able to get true full-screen in Firefox / OS X? I downloaded that AutoHide extension, but it doesn’t seem to work (or I couldn’t figure it out).
After “switching” 3 years ago I still have not gotten over the almost painful transition from 2 button mice, and all the useful shortcuts that Sony had integrated into their trackpads. The one that I miss the most is the mapped trackpad features. Sidetrack comes close, but it is in beta and still has some bugs.
Hopefully Apple will, as doug put it “See the light of day”.
In Safari, if you click on the page, hold down shift and then drag outside the viewport, you can scroll as well.
For God’s sake. We all know the author of this Weblog is a Mac user, so why do people take the obvious and stupid opportunity to jump on the old Mac / PC argument with an article like this?
The article wasn’t a Mac vs PC article, so why do people feel the need for such irrelevant comments?
PS - A short thanks - I read this blog every day. great stuff.
I guess neither side can resist what they view as an opportunity to tweak the other guy’s nose. “Oh, I’ve had that for years… and it’s built in!” or “Really, how useful is that anyway?”
Anyway, I’m curious. In general how would you compare this to using say, a scroll wheel. I can live for (admittedly short) periods of time without a second mouse button, but I hate having to click and/or drag the mouse to scroll.
«While writing this entry, I was also reminded this functionality exists (and has existed for a while) in IE5/Mac if you hold down the Command-key, then click and drag.»
In the good ol’ days of MacOS 9 (sigh…), all the finder windows had this nice little feature.
Don’t know why they stripped it away in OS X - maybe because of the embarassing quartz scrolling perfomance of chetaah and puma…
Opera was the first and best browser for giving full screen presentations. No chrome is visible in fullscreen, not even a scrollbar (unless you set it that way). You can visit the OperaShow page for more info: http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/operashow/
There’s also a presentation generator there.
“After “switching” 3 years ago I still have not gotten over the almost painful transition from 2 button mice”
Why did you have to stop using a 2 button Mouse. I’m using one right now with my PowerBook
It kind of amazes me that people still complain about the apple one button mouse. 2+ buttons, scrollwheels, etc are all available for a Mac, and most are quite inexpensive.
Indeed, it’s really easy to stick with 2+ butons — I use the same USB optical wheely mouse with my wintel laptop for work and my iBook at home. Microsoft even has Mac drivers for it if you want to tweak the acceleration and things, but it also works fine just by plugging it in.
It seems that a few people are likening this feature to using a scroll-wheel. However, certainly with my mouse, the scroll-wheel only allows the page to be scrolled vertically and not horizontally.
Anyway, it’s a nice find Doug, and I’ll be sure to check it out.
I still say you should switch and use a real computer, windows PC. You can delete this one also but remember that being rude to windows users is only going to reduce your credibility.
I deleted Jim’s original comment because it was entirely off-topic. A partial quote from it: “…Windows XP is far more better than Macos [sic] and yet quite cheaper…” may be Jim’s opinion, but it did not add anything productive or relevant to this conversation.
Same goes for another deleted comment by someone named “Tim”: “Why do you first provoke people in your article, try to insult windows users and then demand that everybody has to focus on the topic. That’s not mac fanaticism, it is sort of idiocy.”
My post was not about comparing the Mac and Windows operating systems. I simply discovered a new feature (to me) of a plugin for a Mac application, and thought I’d share. I made no insults toward Windows users. I pointed out an odd trait of Mac users in that we tend to get hyped up over small features, and non-Mac users laugh at us. Again, that’s fine, but there’s no insult there, certainly not one toward Windows users. I still use Windows on occasion, and am well aware of the differences, but that’s not relevant to this post. I’m leaving Jim’s second comment in (#22), and will let others make up their own minds whether it was appropriate or not for comments like it to be made.
I’m putting a response here because neither Jim nor Tim provided real email addresses to which I could respond in person.
Otherwise, thanks to everyone else for your input.
The All-in-One Gestures extension (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/marc.boullet/ext/extensions-en.html) for Mozilla Firefox has drag-scroll support. However, it’s limited to the middle button which makes it unusable for trackpads.
Have any of you guys every tried Knoppix?
The features mentioned in comments by Mark (#7) and Andy (#14) are huge in my opinion. What’s crazy is that I never knew these.
Although I said as much before, this is one of the reasons that I find Apple products so damn compelling. They are simple to use for the beginner and subtlely deep for the advanced user. Amazing.
The first post on this thread is comparing a windows browser to safari. I thought it was appropriate to offer my own perspective about windows vs macs. It wasn’t meant to be irrelavent, cause when I look at the comments I see various issues regarding macs vs windows. I offered my view only.
Hey, let’s all remember that famous line from Darth Vader (slightly paraphrased): “Windows vs Macs? There IS no conflict.”
I really stand for Windows and IE… I don’t see anything wrong with Saft but I think you have more possibilities with IE. Just my 2 cents.
“Windows users are thinking, “Typical of these Mac fanatics to hype on a small feature.” That’s fine. Sometimes we do.” - I think that’s what Windows users do as well. Or am I the only one? - then I should buy a Mac :))
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