This is a long story. For the impatient, the short answer is that there will not be a PithHelmet on 64-bit Safari for some time.

One of the primary directives for SIMBL and PithHelmet was to "first do no harm." The idea being that hacking up someone else's application should only improve it. Under Snow Leopard, many things have changed and they are almost universally considered improvements.

Unfortunately, one of the casualties of these improvements is the relative ease with which applications (in this case Safari) could be hacked after the fact. PithHelmet has grown into an incredibly complex plugin. It hooks into so many subsystems inside Safari, each of which change from time to time. Under Snow Leopard, so much has changed that simply modifying the old code is no longer viable. It will be better to just start fresh.

While I am convinced this is the right approch, this is complicated by the fact that there are many changes to GCC, the dynamic linker, the Objective-C runtime, SIMBL and Cocoa itself. This is a tough task and it will take some time, but I feel that releasing something that doesn't work well would be a bigger mistake.

So where does this leave you the user? Well, I think the best case scenario is to make PithHelmet compatible when Safari is running in 32-bit mode. The functionality of PithHelmet should be left intact and the sacrifice is some amount of speed, particularly when running Javascript-intensive pages.

This fixes the recent crash bugs for Safari 3.2.

PithHelmet-2.8.4.tbz

This fixes the installer for Safari 3.1 on Tiger.

PithHelmet-2.8.3a.tbz

This fixes PithHelmet for Safari 3.1.

PithHelmet-2.8.3.tbz

This build works with Safari 3.0.4 on either Tiger or Leopard but fixes the menu conflicts properly.

I also changed some of the installer error messages to be more meaningful. Hopefully that will cause less confusion.

PithHelmet-2.8.2.tbz

This build works with Safari 3.0.4 on either Tiger or Leopard.

I changed a few of the command keys so that they no longer conflict with new Safari shortcuts.

This doesn't work right now. Unfortunately, I'm out of the country at the moment and I won't have a chance to work on this until I return home.

I took a quick look, but bascially I have to rewrite the thing from scratch. In the meantime, someone else wrote a plugin called "TerminalColours" which seems to be about what I'd do. I can't get it to work exactly (saving seems busted), but I don't have the time to fix my version right now.

This build works with Mac OS X 10.5 and Safari 3.0.4. By far, I spent more time figuring out the new installer and it's charming quirks than I did actually writing code.

Anyway, I've used it for a few days without incident, so I think it should be relatively bug free. Enjoy.

Update: There a number of reports about the plugin just not loading. It's releated to the embedded SIMBL installer.

Update 2: I think I've fixed the installer problem, reinstalling should correct everything.

Update 3: Ok, still hearing about problems.

Update 4: 3rd time's the charm? I changed the installer once again - hopefully this should fix all variants of the problem. I also just noticed that Command-Shift-K and Command-Shift-R have been hijacked by Safari, so I need to remap these in a new version.

I haven't been doing much Mac development for a while. Still, I managed to release a new version of SIMBL for Leopard after some urging by a friend. When Leopard finally releases, I hope to take a few days and finish updating PithHelmet.