Leopard: Pimpin' Safari with InputManagers

We all heard the rumors that InputManagers were completely removed from Leopard. But thankfully as Allan Odgaard of Macromates points out in his blog, that’s not (quite) the situation.

To sum up, InputManagers still work, but not from the User’s Library folder. Only InputManager’s located in /Library/InputManagers/ are loaded if they belong to the root user and wheel group. Also if ~/Library/InputManagers/ exists it seems that all InputManagers are ignored, but not in all cases.

My own personal favorites when it comes to pimpin’ Safari are

Inquisitor, SafariStand and Saft. Inquisitor and SafariStand are completely free to download and use, Saft you have to pay for tho (which I’ve been meaning to get around to for a few months now). All of these three Safari extensions are available and work under Leopard now.

Inquisitor has been updated to automatically install directly into /Library/InputManagers/. If it doesn’t load after install, check if ~/Library/InputManagers/ exists in your home folder and trash it if it does.

SafariStand has a Leopard specific release, which for better or worse drops support for the InputManager’s loading technique, and instead relies solely on SIMBL. Previous versions could be used as an InputManager directly, or loaded via SIMBL. Personally I hope that InputManager support returns soon.

With Safari 3, SafariStand can replace one of the two features I like the most from Saft. Automatically restore all open windows and tabs from previous session. SafariStand has long had a restore feature, but (at least if i remember right) it popped up a window first about it rather than just opening everything again. Safari 3 though added a few feature under the History menu called “Restore All Windows From Last Session”, and SafariStand can automatically invoke that function upon launch.

Saft seems to have gone a somewhat strange way to accomplish Leopard compatibility tho. I was gonna give the demo another try since i did a clean install of Leopard, the traces of the previous expired demo were all gone. However, Saft is now packaged as an application you copy to /Applications/. Then you launch Saft.app rather than Safari.app. The Saft application is basically a launcher for Safari which injects the necessary code into Safari to work.

Personally I find Saft’s new approach quite annoying. Ok, so its not a major deal launching Saft instead. But the thing is, that I shouldn’t have to. InputManager still work, SIMBL still works, there are options. But in all fairness, Saft is probably the most complex of the three extensions I’m covering here, and my guess would be that this was the fastest solution to get Saft back up and running for their customers who have upgraded to Leopard. I’m hoping for a future release which works like a normal InputManager, or in worst case, uses SIMBL.

*UPDATE: With the release of Saft 10.0.1 it can now be used as an InputManager, or a launcher.*

I’d just like to clear up that I don’t hate SIMBL. I just find it unnecessary to use one InputManager to load one that you actually want, while the one you actually want could be loaded directly. Not optimal efficiency, and I unfortunately happen to have a bit of an obsession about efficiency. *whistles innocently*