Power User Monday Tip of the Week

Services In the Contextual Menu

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PowerUser Monday showcases a specific technique/program that helps you get more done with your Mac. If you've got an article suggestion, or comment on what you read, please contact Jon directly.

The last time I touched up on services, I got a lot of email. I usually gauge how good an article is by how much email I get, so I was pretty happy. Several readers noted that they would love to have the services menu right on the contextual menu in OS X. I couldn't agree more. Incidentlly I left this out of the article because that whiny "Apple doesn't do X" stuff is more MacNet2 than I'd like.

I have finally found a way to do it--check out the screen cap from a conversation I recently had with my best friend:

So how's this trickery done? By your new favorite freeware--ICeCoffEE. It's a free little utility that was written by Nocholas Riley. He's a genius... And on the top of my favorites list for writing this sucker. It was really made for opening URL's easily (command click them), but in one of the recent releases the services menu was added into the contextual menu.

Like most cool hacks, it only works in Cocoa apps. However, not even all Cocoa apps... I'm not a Cocoa programmer, so I can't figure out the pattern, but it works in Text Edit which is really handy... iChat (as you see), Mail.app and most of the other Apple made OS X apps (Safari is a notable exception). If you figure out why it works with some and not others, let me know.