Control Option Command

Is it hypocritical of me to write about a Flash blocker when I’ve spent a good portion of my time the last four years doing Flash? Maybe, but some of the sites out there have ridiculous amounts of intrusive and annoying banner ads, and I just can’t stand having my the fans on my Mac blowing a fuse every time I want to check out the news.

My favorite implementation of Flash-blocking has always been ClickToFlash which is a Safari-only plugin that works exactly as advertised. You click the element to load Flash. Sadly, as mentioned, it’s Safari-only and my browser of choice these days is Google Chrome.

Fortunately I found a port, or perhaps a backwards engineered version for Chrome named, somewhat more aggressively, Kill-Flash. It works on exactly the same principle. All Flash elements are replaced with an inconspicuous grey-scale gradient with the label “Flash”, and you “Click To Flash”… Duh.

Stupidly however, I have found no simple way to add sites to the plugins whitelist. A few sites (YouTube and GMail) are whitelisted by default, but no option that I’ve found to add new sites. There are several sites I visit on a regular basis and where I want to see the Flash. Hell, my own blog uses several (subtle, I hope) Flash elements and I don’t need to see those grey boxes every time I come here. In fact, personally I think perhaps a “blacklist mode” would be my preferred way to operate.

So, anyway. I started digging around in the Library to figure out how to add sites to the whitelist. The first issue of course is to find out where the whitelist is located. A couple of headscratches later I found that this is the file you need to deal with:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions/kfncbcioneejfnnelcdmocdjncbmceea /1.1/kill_flash.js

I’m not sure whether or not that crazy string is the same for everyone or generated randomly for each installation. If you see the kill_flash.js you’re there.

Opening this file reveals, at the very top the following variable.

What you need to do is simply append the domains you want to whitelist to this array, in quotes and separated by commas. Like so:

When you’ve done this you might want to create an alias for easy access to the file. Personally I just dragged it to my Dock for the sake of convenience.

I might at some point write an AppleScript or something to make this easier. If that ever happens I’ll be sure to post it here.

Let me get the cheesy redundant joke done right off the bat:

On top of my list of things to get done is to finish Dave Allens Getting Things Done.

How droll. What fun.¹

On top of the personal hit list of Andy Kim of The Potion Factory I’m willing to bet a few shillings you’ll find “Finish The Hit List Touch”, the fabled iPhone companion app to The Hit List Mac. I’m not sure that’s sound prioritizing though. I think perhaps he should bump up “Reconsider customer communication strategies” to number 1.

If you’re unacquainted with the app, its history and the state of things today, let me offer a brief summary.

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A short while ago I wrote about my disappointment with the O’Reilly iPhone apps. The other day I noticed that three of the four titles I originally bought had an update. I’ve finally had time to have a look at them and I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised.

The 1.1 versions are infinitely more readable but also feels a lot more responsive. The code isn’t breaking lines as often and not in such awful ways when it is.

Making code properly formatted on the iPhone is hard, and there’s still room for improvement but these new versions certainly wouldn’t have prompted me to write angry blog posts.
Thanks O’Reilly.