1 I just quit Safari, why does the Installer still thing Safari is running?

You probably have multiple desktops running and another users is running a copy of Safari. That person needs to login and quit Safari. Optionally, you can restart the machine -- that will definitely quit all running copies of Safari.

2 I already donated, do I have to pay to register?

No. If you were goodly enough to pay before registration was required, consider yourself exempt. Go ahead and click the "I paid" button with impunity.

3 How do I block midi files?

They are blocked by default in v2.x - you can toggle the rule on or off to your liking.

4 How do I write rules to match particular URLs?

PithHelmet uses a common software package PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions) to do its pattern matching on the URLs that Safari attempts to load.

The list below is a series of links to other web sites that describe how regular expressions work.

http://zez.org/article/articleprint/11/ - a nice tutorial, very smooth transition from simple to complex expressions
http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/perlre.html - the official documentation on regular expression syntax
http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/perlretut.html - the official tutorial
http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/perlfaq6.html - some Perl-related FAQs
http://www.codeproject.com/string/re.asp - a more generic tutorial on using regex to match patterns
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xbd/re.html - the reference for regular expression explanations (probably a bit heavy for most people)

5 Why doesn't the preferences pane/panel show up?

NOTE: A fix-it tool is included with v0.7.3 and later that should correct this problem. Please see the included installation notes for more information about the tool.

The PithHelmet preference pane should be located in Safari Preferences (Command-Comma). (see the screenshot)

For reasons I don't quite understand, occasionally after an upgrade, Safari will refuse to recognize the newly added PithHelmet preferences pane. Luckily, the work around is simple.

Quit Safari.
Remove the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist file (either by trashing it, or moving it out of the Preferences folder). This will reset your Safari preferences to the factory defaults. You will have to manually restore them using the Safari preferences panel.
Restart Safari and open the preferences.
If you are feeling especially generous with your time, if you could send both copies of the com.apple.Safari.plist in an email, that would help me track down the problem.

If the PithHelmet icon does not appear on the right side of the toolbar, please feel free to contact me via email.

6 Is it possible to use PithHelmet to filter text based ads?

Yes. Google Adwords can be blocked quite easily. (block googlesyndication.com)

7 Is it possible to to reformat sites that I visit very frequently?

Only with PithHelmet 2.0. It's also tricky - it depends what you mean byreformat However, the new PithHelmet engine is quite powerful and can mutate quite a number of things about a web site as it comes streaming in.

8 Will you make PithHelmet available for Mozilla/Firefox/Camino/OmniWeb?

The way PithHelmet works is not really compatible with Mozilla/Firefox/Camino. However, there is an excellent free plugin called AdBlock for Mozilla/Firefox that does a pretty good job. You should be able to copy/paste the default PithHelmet rules in to AdBlock.

OmniWeb has its own content filtering system/ad-blocker. Even though its based on WebCore, as is Safari, PithHelmet is built on a higher level API, WebKit, which OmniWeb does not support. Some PithHelmet rules can be rewritten for use in OmniWeb, but I haven't tested this extensively. I don't have any plans to support it further.

9 Can PithHelmet and Safari Enhancer Co-exist?

Yes. Most people have complained about the lack of control for link underlining. Here's what you do:

Open the rule editor and select the Default Site Rule.
Select the style tab.
Select the Custom Style Sheet popup and select "Other..."
Choose the file ~/Library/Application Support/Safari Enhancer/linkcolours.css

That will do the trick.

10 How do I block Flash content?

In 2.0, there are two ways. First way it to modify the Default Site Rule and uncheck "Enable Plugins." The second was is enable the Flash rule in the rule editor (there is a small checkbox next to it in the rules list.

11 Why does PithHelmet wait for all the ads to load before removing them from the page?

PithHelmet has always had to load the full page before hiding/collapsing blocked content. It doesn't wait for ads to load per-se, just the page itself. If there are ads that don't match the block rules (perhaps because images are linked to a blocked address instead) it might appear that there is a wait.

12 Does PithHelmet download blocked images?

Most of the time, no. If a URL matches a block pattern, Safari won't be allowed to make a connection to grab the image. There are some cases where the URL doesn't match, but is instead linked to some ad web site. In this case, PithHelmet may look at the link once the image has been downloaded and hide the image from view.

13 Are PithHelmet and Saft compatible?

Certain versions are not, though the latest version of Saft (7.5.3 I think) should be.

14 All of a sudden, Safari won't finish loading pages, the progress bar just hangs.

I've seen this happen a couple of times. It is usually accompanied by some entries in the Console which might look like this:

2005-03-11 19:15:23.438 Safari[446] Uncaught exception - *** -[NSURL initFileURLWithPath:]: nil string parameter
2005-03-11 19:15:23.438 Safari[446] *** Attempt to remove unrecognized exception handler 0xbfffd0d0

I've never been able to reproduce this on my machine, but it's happened to a couple of people. The cure is usually to reinstall PithHelmet. If this happens to you, if you could send me a bug report with the output of this command in the Terminal.app:

ls -lR /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/PithHelmet.bundle

that would be swell.

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