02.23.08
Camino Tips: “Open URL in Camino” Service
It’s been a long time since the last entry in the Camino Tips series, but I’m back again with another of Camino’s hidden gems.
Have you ever found a non-clickable website address in another application, or stumbled upon some unkind site that mentions another site without providing a clickable link? If you have, you know that generally the way to view such a site is to select the address (URL), copy it to the clipboard, switch to Camino and open a new tab or window, paste the address into the location bar, and hit return. That’s six steps. Fans of drag-and-drop know that you can make sure Camino is visible, select the address, and drag it to the tab bar (or any tab widget or a page’s content, if you want to replace the current content of a tab) in order to load the site. That’s only three steps—much better—but you have to make sure both Camino and the other application are visible at the same time if you’re dragging a link from another application.
Enter the “Open URL in Camino” Service. If you’ve ever looked in the “Services” sub-menu in any program’s application menu, you may have noticed a long list of bizarre items, services that a particular application offers to all other applications on your Mac. Camino offers a service that lets you open a URL from another application, and the service can be invoked with a quick press of ⇧⌘U.
For example, select the URL below
http://caminobrowser.org/
and press ⇧⌘U; Camino’s home page should open in a new tab (or window, according to your preferences). Opening a non-clickable URL now only takes two actions.
Even better, the Service supports bookmark shortcuts, so if you have set up a shortcut for a search engine, you can quickly perform a web search from another application. Suppose you have a search shortcut “google” for Google’s search URL fragment (http://www.google.com/search?q=%s) and a friend sends you an email or instant message that reads, in part,
google Cairo for more info!
You can select “google Cairo” in your mail or instant messaging client and press ⇧⌘U; Camino will instantly load those Google search results your friend wanted you to see.
The possibilities are, well, not endless, but still numerous; experiment with the feature and enjoy faster access to plain-text URLs, bookmark shortcuts, and shortcut searches.
February 24, 2008 at 6:55 am
Unfortunately, the shortcut conflicts with the Word service (where it converts to uppercase, which btw makes a lot more sense associated with command-shift-u), which is a real swiss-army knife for me.
Service Scrubber (http://www.manytricks.com/servicescrubber/) comes to the rescue: you can use it to disable services and to change shortcuts, too. We may probably want to check if the Word service usage justify changing this shortcut in Camino.