This is Technology Bytes, Episode 71 for July 14th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am going to get many episodes out of what Apple announced at WWDC24, and that continues.
This week I want to talk about a new feature in Safari called Safari Highlights.
It is only available in the beta, and so that’s not something that those who have not installed the beta will see.
It’s pretty neat, so I will talk about what it is, talk a little bit about what I know of how it works, which is very little.
And then I’ll talk a little bit about how I’ve seen it in action.
So what is Safari Highlights?
It’s a setting in Safari, so you can do it on the iPad, you can do it on your iPhone, you can do it on your Mac.
It’s all part of the latest Safari and the betas.
And what it allows you to do…
Now, that’s not the right way to say it.
What Safari Highlights does is a glimpse into Apple’s artificial intelligence, or as they call it, Apple intelligence.
And what it does on certain sites, and it’s not available on every website, and so it’s kind of a hit or miss function at that point.
But I think it will become more common.
And basically what it does is it looks at the website that you’re on and determines if there are things on that site that you might want to have brought to your attention without having to scroll through the entire site.
So if you’re on a travel site, it might bring up a map that shows where you are in relationship to the location that you’re looking at.
Or it may bring up a video that might be on the site and let you view that in a picture-in-picture mode so that you don’t have to scroll all the way through the sites and find those things.
And it may give you an overview, kind of a synopsis, as it were, of an article on the site that you might be looking at.
And so basically what it does, in essence, is to help you know what is on the website without you having to look at the entire thing.
So just a preview of what the website does, what information it provides, so that you can decide if it’s the site that you want to spend a little more time on, if you want to review an article more in-depth, actually read it.
And it gives you some shortcuts to items on the site that Apple Intelligence feels is something that might be of interest.
So I don’t know if that does it justice, but that’s the way that I perceive this Safari Highlights function.
And then how does it work?
Well, this is kind of the magic of Apple Intelligence.
It has a way to preview the site.
It has a way to look through the site and see what’s on it and to highlight things that it thinks the user might be interested in.
How it does that exactly is, of course, not known to me because that may be inside of Apple’s secret sauce.
But in essence, it has to, for it to work as I see it, review the entire site, find clickable things, find maps maybe, find audio, find video, and then determine what is important because they don’t want, you know, Apple Intelligence doesn’t want to highlight an ad that’s a video or audio that’s an ad or text that’s an ad inside of someone’s website.
They want to let the user know what the meat of that website is.
And so exactly how, what’s the logic behind it?
It’s the same thing that we do as people.
We would maybe skim through a site, look at the content fairly quickly, decide what looks important, and then go back through a little more slowly and then look at the things that are of importance to us.
What Apple Intelligence does, it allows you to do that in a much easier form and in a much more efficient manner so that you don’t have to spend as much time on the site.
Now, the people who make the site, the people who make ads that are on the site, they might not like that very much, but I’m not here necessarily to please others when I’m looking at a website.
What I’m here to do is get the information that I want in the manner that I want and correctly.
And I think that Safari Highlights helps me to do that in a more efficient manner so I don’t have to spend as much time on the site as I might otherwise.
So what does that look like in action and practical application?
So in my research, limited as it was, trying to go to different sites and see what they offered was a little bit difficult, actually, because it’s not every site.
I’m not planning a trip, so maybe that has something to do with it.
Just trying to find sites to be able to see how the function works I found to be a little difficult, but that’s also because I’m not using Safari in that moment as someone who might want that.
So how does it present itself?
So when you are in Safari and you’re on a site that offers some kind of highlight, the toolbar, so usually it’s where your capital A, little a were in the right hand side of your toolbar.
Or if you’re using the compact mode, it would be in the left hand side of your toolbar or vice versa.
I think I have that backwards.
But anyway, in that tools section, and it looks different now, it looks like a little screen with some lines underneath it.
And if there is a highlight available, then that little tool will have, I guess for lack of a better definition, some purple sparkly things around it.
And so then you know that that site has something to offer in the Safari highlights mode.
And so when you click on that or tap, depending on what device you’re on, then it brings up the highlights of the site so that you can see what’s there and decide if that is where you actually want to be or if you want to search for something else or how you might want to use that site.
I haven’t seen the video portion yet.
I still need to do some research on that, but I have watched videos on how it works.
And actually, I found that in some searching, you can see what sites other people go to and then go to those same sites and see Safari highlights in action.
But it was pretty neat on one site where I was looking at an article and when I clicked on it to read it, I could see the little purple highlights.
Click on the tool and then it gives me an overview of what that article is all about.
And then I can decide if I actually want to read it in detail.
So pretty cool function in my opinion and looking forward to using it more in my surfing of the web.
The other thing I wanted to point out, though, is in that tool set, there’s a couple neat things that are fairly easy to get to.
One is the search.
So if you click on that little tool icon, then the first thing in the list is a search button.
And that lets you search that site for anything you want to search for.
And then there’s also the font.
So you can change the font of that site smaller and bigger.
That’s pretty much it.
And then there’s like your standard three dots that gives you other menu options based on what is available on that particular site.
Most often when I use that, it gives you the option to go into reader mode.
It has some other options that you can set for that particular site.
But right at your fingertips, some pretty good tools that aren’t part of Safari highlights that lets you use the web and those particular sites exactly how you would want to use them.
So overall, I don’t have a ton of experience with Safari highlights.
I look forward to learning more, but I feel like it’s a good function to have when you are searching for things, when you are doing some research so that it lets you know up front if that site has additional information that you may want to use.
So that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
And I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
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