Doing the apple dance

Dictionary integration with Safari

I mentioned in my last post that I would follow up with another neat Safari tick. Here it is: Dictionary Integration.

In actual fact, before people leap down my throat, dictionary integration happens with any Cocoa application. Even TextEdit and TextWrangler. Yes, even XCode, which happily treats word breaks according to Objective-C rules. That is, expectedRaise is treated as two separate dictionary links, “expected” and “Raise”. Neat.

Anyway, how do you get this integration? Control-Command-D will bring up the little dictionary menu window. There are some useful behaviours to this little window:

If you keep Control-Command held down, the window will update as you move the mouse around the text.
You can use the sub-menu at the bottom-left of the mini-dictionary to choose between the various Dictionary categories (here the word “Dictionary” means the Dictionary Application found at /Applications/Dictionary.app). By default Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Apple (whatever that’s for).
You can click the “More…” link at the bottom right of the mini-dictionary to open the Dictionary application at this word.

See the video below for a quick demo. Note the keys pressed throughout at the bottom of the video.

Note: Firefox is not a Cocoa native application and as such does not support this functionality. I frequently come across words I’m unclear about, and so this was a compelling reason to switch from Firefox (of which I’d been an avid proponent for many years) to Safari. On a PC, I will still use Firefox, but on a Mac I’m a Safari man.

Cocoa Dictionary integration from Nixta on Vimeo.

Tags: Cocoa, Command-Control-D, Dictionary, Mac OS X, Safari

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Applications, OS, Usage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.