MacMost Now 573: Useful Safari Extensions

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's look at some useful Safari extensions. So, of course you can find Safari extensions by going to extensions.apple.com or just using the Safari Extensions Gallery menu item in the Safari menu. Once you have some installed, you go to preferences, and then to extensions, and you can see a list of the ones you have installed. Let's look at these four. So, you think a very basic extension would be one that puts a toolbar at the top of Safari. Let's turn the Widgets extension on and you can see it puts a toolbar up here, and we have a customize anything. We can do that here inside of the preferences, we can have it display weather and change the location. We can have it display an RSS ticker if we want, a clock, and several clocks in fact, and the date, and a few other things. And, once we've got that, click done up here, and now we get this toolbar here with a bunch of useful stuff. So, since you can put any RSS feed you want here in the top, it could be very useful indeed for just having some basic information that you have to access all the time, always at the top of your Safari window. So, here's one called AutoPagerize. So, you turn this one on, and what'll happen is, then things like search results that have several pages in them will appear as a single page. Let's do as an example, search for MacMost, and we get a list of things here. And, normally at the bottom, it would have a list of pages, and you go to page two, but you can see here I've automatically got page two there. Matter of fact, as I scroll down, you can see it adds page three, page four, et cetera. It keeps adding them to this one long page here so I don't have to keep jumping from page to page. So, the Print Plus extension is really useful when you only want to print a certain section of a page, not the entire thing. Very useful when you get like a receipt, and the receipt has tons of ads and menus and things, and you just want to print that important bit of information. So, for instance, it puts this button up here, and now I can highlight places that I want to print. And, I can actually do many of them, so I'm gonna click this one, this one here, and just have this article printed, rather than everything on the rest of the page. So, I press the print button, and then what comes out here, you can see in the preview is just the sections that I've selected. So, the next one that I want to show you is the Gmail Counter, and it puts this toolbar here at the top. And you have a lot of customizable things. You can even use it with Google domains, as well as a regular Gmail account. And, what it'll do is, it'll just check for incoming mail and put it here in the toolbar, and you can see the subject there. And you can move back and forth between the messages just to see their titles. You can even click on a button to compose a quick message, and of course just clicking on the message title itself will take you right to Gmail, so if you use Gmail a lot, this could be very handy. And if you do use Gmail a lot, you should check in the mail category inside of Extensions at Apple.com. You can see there are a lot of Gmail specific extensions. So, there's just a quick look at some Safari extensions that I find useful. There are a lot of other ones there in the Gallery and more added all the time. Till next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.