stevenberlinjohnson.com: Exposé and Safari

Like many OS X users, I've grown completely dependent on the miniature-window navigation of Exposé; I suspect I still click the mouse more than I hit those Exposé function keys, but it's a remarkably close call. Now that I'm hooked, I'm finding myself wanting to Exposize other parts of the UI -- particularly my recent browsing history. Hitting f10 already lets me see all my open windows in Safari, but most of my surfing through the day happens in a single window, with one page replacing the next. I'm constantly pulling down the "history" menu item and scrolling through literally dozens of names to find a page I pulled up a few hours ago. The Exposé approach would be much easier: hit another key, and Safari instantly shows me all the pages I've visited in the past 24 hours, sized to fit on my screen. To make this more manageable, it would make sense to have an option to show only one page per domain name, since I'll often surf through a dozen pages from a single site that are visually indistinguishable from one another.

Knowing Apple's track record of delivering exactly what I've been looking for in new releases, they're probably about to announce this feature in Tiger next month. Can't wait.

PS. Note the number of links in the previous paragraph. A while I ago I begged the LazyWeb to come up with a URL posted tool that would let me quickly grab URLs from my recent history and past them as formatted HTML links into another application. I'm happy to say that I found exactly what I was looking for: the program URL Manager Pro, which seems to have a lot of other useful features as well.

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of seven books, and co-founder of three web sites. We spend most of the year in Marin County, California though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbeej at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

My Books

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
An exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books. Sold more copies in hardcover than anything else I've written.
The Invention of Air
The story of the British radical chemist Joseph Priestley, who ended up having a Zelig-like role in the American Revolution. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals.
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!

Comments

Really good suggestion, I highly recommend hitting http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/ or the bugreporter http://bugreport.apple.com (you need a free Apple Developer Connection account to file bugs) to let the right people know...

Posted by: _m | May 24, 2004 at 02:02 AM

Check out LaunchBar 4. Along with indexing applications and files, it indexes bookmarks and browser history. command-space to activate LaunchBar, "sh" to get into your safari history, and then type some letters that were in a recent URL or page title. A list pops up and narrows as you type, and of course you can navigate the list with arrow keys too.

The real treat is the search templates - activate launch bar, type a few letters to find the search template, type a space, and type your search term. (google, imdb, amazon, iTunes Music Store, anything you can search) Yes, Mozilla has offered this for a while, but the key-combo activation makes getting around with LaunchBar a breeze. Now if I sit down at anyone else's computer, I'm at a loss if they don't have it installed!

Posted by: Joe | May 24, 2004 at 10:56 AM

I haven't tried it yet, but a program called History Hound (http://www.stclairsw.com/HistoryHound/) promises to index all your web browsing, allowing you to find any page in the browser history that you had visited within a certain period.

Posted by: Steven Shaviro | May 24, 2004 at 12:41 PM

Steven: set your Expose functions to window corners so that you don't have to reach for those function keys. It will save you many trips to the keyboard.

Posted by: Andrew | May 24, 2004 at 12:46 PM

most of my surfing through the day happens in a single window, with one page replacing the next

Couldn't you just use Safari's tabbed browsing feature in the meantime? I haven't experimented to see how many tabs you can have open at once, but I bet it's a lot. Right now I've got about 10 tabs open; going back to a site I visited a while ago involves simply clicking on a tab. Creating a new tab is easy, just hit command-T ("command" being the Apple key). And if you're clicking on a link on a Web page and want to open that in a new tab, just hold down the Apple key while you click.

Posted by: Brad Hurley | May 25, 2004 at 03:39 AM

A WebKit -based browser called Trailblazer (http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/macwarriors/projects/trailblazer/) has a feature to index your history and show it as thumbnails. The browser is a bit buggy but it could give you some new thoughts you can ask Apple to implement :)

Posted by: Jussi | May 25, 2004 at 04:58 AM

Trailblazer - mentioned by another poster, above - sounds a lot like what you're envisioning. It basically shows your entire history as a tree of thumbnails, and is clearly an offshoot of Vannevar Bush's memex idea.

But the actual execution was still very rough. I'm pretty sure Apple could do it better, if they wanted to. Although caching and displaying so many thumbnails would probably get unwieldy fast.

Posted by: Christopher SJ Ong | May 26, 2004 at 01:21 AM

With regard to Exposé, I HIGHLY recommend getting a five-button mouse, such as the (eek) Microsoft Intellimouse. You can then map the various Exposé functions to the extra buttons - I never need to reach for those function keys at all, making Exposé even yet still more brilliant.

Posted by: Rik Abel | May 26, 2004 at 05:05 AM

I agree with Rik about a 5 button mouse. I only have a 3 button mouse, but using the scroll wheel button to activate the all windows expose function is awesome. I use it all the time. It has become part of how I work. Also using the Tab browsing in Safari has been great. If I am on a page with link I would like to visit as I am reading, say a post like the original in this thread, I will just right click and choose 'Open Link in New Tab.' Having made specific selections in 'Safari Preferences (Tabs)' when I do my right click and select, the other page starts loading in the next tab as I am still reading the original page.

A history search function would be great. Say something that worked like the Finder search does. But just make it specific to Safari history.

P.S. I should have guessed that a guy responsible for writing 'Emergence' would be an apple user!

Posted by: Morgan Daly | May 27, 2004 at 04:25 AM

If you want to search your history/bookmarks in Safari then click on the "show all bookmarks" icon and hit CMD+F (find) type in your search terms for the URL or title of the page that you are looking for and hit return. I found this out sort of by accident but it'll search your bookmarks and history.

Also, I recommend what another poster mentioned which is CMD+link to create new tabs in Safari for each new web page. That has been my preferred method of web browsing since I switched to Safari.

Posted by: The Great Gazoo | May 27, 2004 at 05:25 AM

You are truly the 'Great' Gazoo. That was great tip. Thanks

Posted by: Morgan Daly | May 28, 2004 at 08:43 AM

Thanx for tips!

MiC

Posted by: MCarter | July 02, 2004 at 04:20 AM