What at first sight looks like a warped version of Safari is actually a new WebKit-based browser called Cruz. The developer, Todd Ditchendorf, is probably best known for creating the nifty Fluid.app.
The feature list reads pretty compelling:
- Open plugin architecture
- Full screen browsing mode
- Enhanced Google search results
- Built-in TinyURL creation
- …
Plugin Architecture
The plugin architecture is quite interesting, because, apart from Firefox, no other Mac browser has support for real plugins (at least not that I know of). Safari can be tweaked by using Input Managers, but that’s unsupported by Apple and may stop working at any time.
One cool plugin is called BrowsaBrowsa, which basically lets you browse two webpages side-by-side. Very handy, especially since current monitors are now virtually all wide-screen. You can control how the pages are displayed, so both horizontal and vertical window splits are possible.
But you can do more: set the User Agent of a BrowsaBrowsa pane to Mobile Safari, and mobile-aware sites serve up pages optimized for the iPhone, which fit perfectly into a sidebar.
Enhanced Google search results
This option puts a screenshot of the page next to each Google search result. For now this only works with Google, but Todd says he’ll eventually add other search engines too.
The loading of the screenshots takes a bit, depending on the speed of your internet connection. If you activate the Thumbnail plugin, the screenshots are also shown in a separate pane in coverflow, which is nice because you can visit a link from the search results and select a different link from the Thumbnail view, without having to go back to the Google results.
One thing I immediately wished for was a thumbnail view for all currently open tabs. I tend to have a dozen or so tabs open in Safari at any given time, and at some point the tab captions get really hard to navigate. A coverflow mode for tabs would be very cool indeed.
Built-in Tiny URL creation
Forget having to open a separate window for shortening a URL. Simply open the page you want to link to in a tab, select File->Create Tiny URL for This Page (or press 
T) and the shortened URL is copied to the clipboard.
This also works for links in a page: simply right-click (or left-click) and select Create Tiny URL from Link from the contextual menu.
You can also resolve Tiny URLs without clicking on them. Select Resolve Tiny URL from a shortened URL on a web page and the short URL will expand to show the actual URL. Very handy for when you don’t trust a link and want to see beforehand where it’s going.
Conclusion
There’s a lot more to Cruz than I could fit in this little review, so you best visit the Cruz site yourself and give it a whirl. The version number 0.1 implies that this is still early-stage software, so expect some glitches and missing features. For example, bookmark management is still rudimentary and there are some display errors when using enhanced search results. But for a 0.1 Cruz definitely looks promising.
To prevent iPhoto from launching every time you connect a camera, open the application named Image Capture, open its preferences and select No application from the dropdown box.
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