Safari Extensions

If you’re a user of Instapaper, you might miss the auto-archive feature they used to have. It would automatically archive an article when you clicked on it to read it. At the time that they removed the feature, I created FIFO Links, which uses HTML5 storage to accomplish the same thing. The catch with FIFO Links is that it didn’t provide shared storage; it only worked in one browser.

Recently, I decided that I should give Instapaper another shot (driven mostly by support for Instapaper in Reeder, the excellent RSS app for iPad). So as a result, I created a Safari extension that revives Instapaper’s auto-archive feature.

The source is also available on Github.

Placemarker is for those times when you wish you could save your place in a long web page so you could come back to that point later without having to hunt for it. Placemarker lets you create special bookmarks, called placemarks, that it saves to Instapaper or Read It Later, whichever service you prefer. (You can also save a placemark as a Safari bookmark, though you’ll have to save the bookmark manually.)

The magic happens when you later open the placemark: Safari will automatically scroll to the phrase you selected when you created the placemark.

Designed for Google Reader, Simplify GR integrates tools such as Helvetireader and FancyBox to provide a clean, minimalistic reading experience.

The Simplify GR extension utilizes Helvetireader to reduce the clutter of the Google Reader interface by limiting the number of colours, buttons and social features normally present. When reading articles in Google Reader some entries contain the entire article, while others do not, requiring you to visit the originating website. Simplify GR makes this process more seamless by opening the originating web site in an clean panel that floats overtop of the Google Reader page. This panel allows you to read an article and return to Google Reader in an incredibly seamless fashion. Simplify GR takes its seamlessness even further by opening full articles loaded within this floating panel through Instapaper‘s text view–providing a distraction-free reading experience similar to Safari 5’s Reader mode.

All of these options are configurable within Safari 5’s Preference Extensions pane. You can enable/disable Helvetireader as well as enable/disable FancyBox or adjust how it works.

Adds single-keystroke sending of the current Google Reader article to your Instapaper account. Just install and add your Instapaper username and password in the settings, then choose your hotkey. Any time you’re reading an article in Google Reader, just hit your hotkey and it’s in your Instapaper bookmark list!

Gives you two ways to send links to your Instapaper Account in the background. You can right-click on a link and InstapaperIt via the contextual-menu. Or you can hold down the option/alt key while clicking on a link and it will get Instapapered.

Franker is a Safari 5 extension which mimics Ilya Frank’s Reading Method for web sites.

The method helps people learn foreign languages and differs from common parallel texts method used in many books in a way it injects translation directly into the original text. Injections are small (usually several words or sentence, with notes if necessary). This way you read sentence on foreign language first, then check you understand everything correctly by translation and learn new words and phrases in context.

The extension does its best to mimic the method using Google Translate; it does NOT produce the same result as real method would. Obviously this simple script can’t make useful notes and doesn’t do deep analysis of a text, it just translates complete sentences.

Optimize Legibility is a simple Safari extension that injects a single CSS attribute (text-rendering:optimizeLegibility) into every page. This will improve kerning and ligatures in text.

Just saw this (via Daring Fireball):

Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures

And thought, “there’s gotta be an extension for that.”  Well, looks like there isn’t… so I made one.