Power User Monday Tip of the Week
Master The Services Menu
If you'd like to submit a topic for a future PowerUser Monday please let me know.
OS X introduced a lot of new things for Mac users... Most of them good. One of the biggies that most people still don't use is the Services menu. You know that thing off the Application menu that seems to always have what you want grayed out? That's it. Hopefully this article will help dymystify it a bit... Maybe you'll even learn to love it.
What's Been Said
Myth
Services are only used by Cocoa Applications.
I subscribed to this, but then had a talk with a Cocoa/Carbon programmer. It's insanely easy to use services in Cocoa... It takes some work in Carbon. They can be used in both. However, you'll find most Carbon apps don't use it (it's possible though just look at the Finder having services).Myth
Invariably the option I want isn't available (it's grayed out).
I know it seems like that... You just have to learn how to use the services menu. There's only one exception I know of... Grab's menu. Only seems to work in TextEdit.
Using Services
With those out of the way, let's get on to the meaty stuff. Here's what a typical services menu looks like (perhaps minus the Bluetooth option):
Here's what mine looks like after some apps I have added to it:
The one I use most often is Subscribe In NetNewsWire which puts my selection into my subscription list for one of my favorite apps of all time... NetNewsWire. If you don't use it but have broadband you're probably not fit to be a Mac user. Brent posted a great video of how to subscribe via the services menu that you should check out (even if you don't use NNW, because it will convince you how handy services are).
Most services use text in some way, for example if you're at a website that has a killer joke and you want to send it to a friend, you can just highlight the text, go to the services menu, hit Mail and then choose send selection. It will open Mail.app (if needed) create a new message, and make the body the text you selected. A real time saver!
Try out some of the others now that you know most of them rely on selected text in an app that supports them (try using Safari or Camino instead of Internet Explorer).
Getting More
There are tons of third party services that you can snag for free. Just searching for 'service' on MacUpdate yielded tons of results.
If you find a service that's just too cool to not tell everyone about, send it to me and if it really is cool, I'll add it to the list below.
All personal comments should be sent to the author. All other discussion should be done in the Forums
[ Back to Power User Monday Tip of the Week | Sections Index ]