Filed under: How-tos, Tips and tricks
Mini-icons for Safari Bookmarks Bar
There's a really nice tip over at DownloadSquad today for making "mini-icons" to save space in your Safari Bookmark Bar. In the picture to the right, you'll notice that I have an Apple symbol as my bookmark to Apple.com and /. as a link to Slashdot. It's really just using fonts creatively alongside special symbolic fonts. Jordan provides a link to an older 43 Folders article, but it doesn't really provide a full how-to. I've touched on this before, but it has been a while, so I thought I'd show everyone how and why I do this, and not just with Safari.
The Character Palette (pictured in full after the jump) is one of my favorite little bits of Mac OS X that often goes overlooked. Any character embedded in any of the fonts installed in your computer is accessible via this little menu system. With it, you can add special symbols to any word processor you are running or whatever program you may have running in the forefront. As you can see, I've added the unicode telephone symbol to my iChat status menu. The only downside to this is that it won't display properly in chat clients that cannot handle unicode (which means nearly everyone running Windows).
You can activate the Character Palette by navigating to System Preferences—>International, click on the Input Menu, and make sure that there is a check mark next to the Character Palette. The result will be a flag representing your keyboard layout in the menu bar; click on this and select Show Character Palette to launch it whenever you like. Read more after the jump...
You can leave the Character Palette running and simply call it to the front whenever you need to add a new character / special symbol. Simply highlight the symbol you wish to use and click the Insert button to add the symbol to the foremost text field. You can also click the little sprocket menu icon in the lower left corner of the Character Palette and select "Add to Favorites" to add the selected symbol to your favorites. Now you can keep all your hard to find symbols in the Favorites pane of the Character Palette. Enjoy!
[via DownloadSquad]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tom Edwards said 9:46AM on 7-19-2005
For even more added coolness, you can rename your Macintosh HD to just the Apple logo!
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Andre said 11:17AM on 7-19-2005
Hey CK, what's the first icon on the left of your screenshot?
Thanks!,
Andre
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C.K. Sample, III said 11:24AM on 7-19-2005
Andre, that's Kaid: http://www.teamxlink.co.uk/
Useful for doing things like playing your PSP with other users over the Internet. ;-)
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Steve M said 11:47AM on 7-19-2005
I've been using this method for quite awhile now, and it is very handy for keeping the menu size down, and the icons are frequently easier to remember than the arbitrary words. Of course, I'm a very visual person, and others may not find this as useful.
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jp said 12:06PM on 7-19-2005
I love the extra real estate on my bookmark bar, but I'm having a hard time find the Apple Logo. Is it in the Character palette or somewhere else, I check everywhere..
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Scott Gardner said 12:25PM on 7-19-2005
I found the Apple symbol (View: > Glyph, then Font: Apple Symbols and scroll about 2/3 down). There are a few Apple symbols, but when I try to insert them into Safari the "Insert with Font" is disabled and the message in the status bar at the bottom reads, "The current application does not support glyph variants." I'm running Tiger. I wonder if this is a change, or just how did you get that symbol into Safari CK? Thanks!
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pocket said 12:35PM on 7-19-2005
C.K. - What games you playing on there? I use that program often to play PSP or Xbox. Only thing with the XBOX, there are so many damn canadians on there. And one could swear they are all 14 years old. Or is that just how most of them sound?
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Chris said 1:00PM on 7-19-2005
I keep getting "The current application does not support glyph variants" in the Character Pallette and it won't go. What am I doing wrong?
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derek said 1:18PM on 7-19-2005
opt-shift-k
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iBode said 7:00PM on 7-19-2005
What's the option-Letter for the Apple sign?
You know the old-fashioned way?
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iBode said 7:05PM on 7-19-2005
Sorry, that's what the previous post was.
I thought it was the solution the Character Palette problem.
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Dickie said 10:50PM on 7-19-2005
You can use the Apple symbol in Glyph Catalog -> Apple LiSung. Just highlight it and click on 'insert with font'
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