Doing the apple dance

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.

There are a few reasons to use Safari over other browsers on the Mac. Most of them are UI shortcuts based on the fact that Safari is written natively in Cocoa, which gives some direct advantages. I’ll cover another one in a separate video, but this one is a useful shortcut which reminds me of RISC OS’s file load and save operations, back in the day.

Uploading a file with Safari from Nixta on Vimeo.