PopSearch 1.9.7
Fixes a bug where the extension sometimes failed to hide the search suggestions menu when you opened the popover.
Fixes a bug where the extension sometimes failed to hide the search suggestions menu when you opened the popover.
A slight tweak. When you start entering a query, PopSearch will now wait until you’ve typed at least three characters before fetching search suggestions. The purpose of this to prevent the suggestions menu from appearing while you’re only typing a search engine shortcut (such as ‘g’ for Google).
Of course, the change won’t prevent the suggestions menu from appearing if the shortcut you’re typing is longer than two characters!
Download PopSearch 1.9.6 or let Safari update your copy
Fixed a bug that caused these extensions to use an incorrect tag when backing up items to Delicious.
It’s strange that this feature never occurred to me before, but PopSearch now has an option, enabled by default, to show Google search suggestions below the query box as you type your query. Suggestions and the old search history feature are mutually exclusive. As with search history, you use the up/down arrow keys to select a suggestion.
This feature uses an unofficial Google API, so when Google removes the API (as they are very likely at some point to do), suggestions will stop working.
Download PopSearch 1.9 or let Safari update your copy
Not having used PopSearch’s history feature in many months, I hadn’t realized how much it slowed down typing in the query field when there are many history items. I’ve made it faster now.
When PopSearch was updated to use a popover in Safari 5.1, I had to disable the search history feature because there was a bug in Safari 5.1 that caused it to freeze solid when a popover was dynamically resized. Apple has fixed that bug, so I’ve reenabled search history.
At some point in the last few updates to PopSearch, a bug crept in that caused the search dialog to appear partially off-window sometimes for some users. I still don’t know why that happened, because I’ve never been able to duplicate the problem. That hasn’t stopped me from finding a way to make the bug go away, and now I present to you the fruit of my (slight) labors.
Download PopSearch 1.8.3 or let Safari update your copy.
These updates include a usability tweak and a couple of bug fixes.
The tweak only makes a difference if you’ve set the option to open search results (in PopSearch) or the selected bookmark (in Moofmarks) in a new tab by default. From now on, if the current tab is empty, this setting will be ignored, and the search results or bookmark will open in this tab.
The reasoning is: if the current tab is empty, why not just use it? Why open another empty tab just to load the search results or the bookmark? Thanks go to a really nice and helpful user for pointing this out to me.
The bugs that were fixed are as follows. First, in Safari 5.1, when either extension opened a new tab, the keyboard focus would move to the address bar rather than the document in the new tab as it did in Safari 5.0. This is not really a bug of the extension, but I didn’t like it, so I fixed things so the keyboard focus would be with the new document.
The second bug also involves keyboard focus, but it is rather more obscure. If you used the new (Safari 5.1-only) popover UI for either extension, and if the extension opened a new tab, and if you then closed the new tab, thus returning to the old tab—assuming you hadn’t closed the old tab in the meantime—the document in the old tab would have lost the keyboard focus, because the popover would have had it at the time the new tab was opened. This was annoying, because hotkeys would no longer work on the old tab unless you clicked inside it. To fix this, I changed the extensions so that when they open a new tab, they will first close themselves, and only then open the new tab. Closing the popover before opening the new tab has the effect of returning the keyboard focus to the old tab very briefly before the new tab is opened. That’s enough to ensure that when the old tab is again activated, the keyboard focus will be on the document, not in la-la land.
First, about the bug fix. A kind donator pointed out to me that if you use Safari’s “Reset Safari” command, or the command “Remove All Website Data” in the preferences, PopSearch stops working. This is because those commands blow away PopSearch’s local database, and when that happens, PopSearch does not recreate it. Somehow, it never occurred to me that the database could ever be deleted. That’s because I never use those commands myself. Talk about sloppy programming!
So, starting with version 1.7.8, PopSearch will recreate its own database if it’s missing. But please note two things: One, you will lose your custom search engines. Two, PopSearch won’t notice the database is missing until you restart Safari, so please do that if you reset Safari or remove all website data.
Now, about that new setting. It’s a bit esoteric. Have you ever noticed that if you select some text on the current web page before invoking PopSearch, that text will be automatically inserted into the query input box? Pretty cool feature, if you ask me. it makes it really easy to do a search on a word or phrase you come across while browsing.
Today, I thought of something that would make the feature even cooler. It occurred to me that most times you do a search on selected text, you probably want to open the results in a new tab, not load them in the current tab. Now, you’ve always been able to open search results in a new tab by pressing ⌘Enter in PopSearch. But since I’m a lazy bastard, I want to open the results in a new tab by just pressing Enter if I’m searching on a text selection.
So now, there’s a new setting with a rather long name: “Open results in a new tab when searching on selected text”. If it’s enabled—and it’s enabled by default—you don’t need to press ⌘Enter to use a new tab if you’re searching on selected text; a plain Enter keypress will do. If you want to open the results in the current tab, you can press ⌘Enter.
Download PopSearch 1.7.8 or let Safari update your copy.
