Posts Tagged ‘web forms’

WebKit nightly builds now offer Gmail rich text

Friday, April 27th, 2007

Web kitAnthony Baker emails to tell me that the new nightly builds of WebKit (which will be used for Safari 3.0) have fixed the WYSIWYG form editing problem that bedevils users of current Safari versions.

This means, he says, that “you can now hit Gmail and get the same kinds of rich-text editing capability provided to IE, FF and other browsers. You can also access Google Docs.”

And it’s true. Using Safari 2.0.4 (419.3) the formatting bar in Gmail’s basic HTML view doesn’t appear:

Gmailsafari 2

But WebKit displays the HTML formatting bar in all its glory (as it also does in Google Docs):

Gmail web kit

Not only that but some basic formatting keyboard shortcuts work too. So ⌘B and ⌘I toggle bold and italic text, making it easier for die-hard keyboard users to format their emails without fingers leaving the keyboard.

Not all the shortcuts work though. Tab+Enter doesn’t send a message and ⌘U doesn’t produce underlined text.

The latest beta of the much-hyped Desktop client for Gmail, MailPlane which I have been fooling around with for a few days also offers the option to use WebKit behind the scenes to give users this added functionality (but that’s a topic for another longer post.)

WebKit scolds you for daring to use extensions, but that’s a small price to pay for a user in love with Gmail’s HTML features.

[Thanks, Anthony!]

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Two smart tricks with Mail’s address fields

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

AddresstokensA poster on macOSXHints points out a smart use for the “tokenised” email addresses that Mail.app places in its To: and Cc: fields.

Coincidently, I stumbled across another unexpected use for this at work today.

The macOSXHints poster explains how to quickly enter email addresses in to a web form by first entering the name into a new Mail.app message. Mail auto-completes the names, providing those nice aqua tokens.

These can be be selected and dragged over to the web form, where they transform into a comma-separated list of email addresses. Clever.

But there’s more. Today at work I had to suggest the creation of a new internal mailing list. Rather than type all the email addresses out, I tried the same trick.

I entered the names in the To: field of the message, let Mail auto-complete them, then selected them all and dragged them into the body of the email. Voila! — a nice, comma-separated list of email addresses appeared:

Draggingtokens

This is not a high-use tip. I’ve been using a Mac for four years now, and this is the first time I was moved to try it. Still, it’s nice to know that it is there, waiting for me to discover all over again when I need to do this in 2011.

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