Last night the good people from iMug had me over to talk about Snow Leopard and in particular the improved services menu. There a good mob the guys and gals of iMug mostly older professionals who use Macs as part of their every day work / life.
Basically I demonstrated for them the improvements (under the hood) that Apple have made in the latest version of OS X (10.6). By my count Snow Leopard contains over 100 significant modifications and improvements, but more than enough people have already covered most of these on other blogs so I’ll not add to the noise on this. If you are interested to find out more then check out Apple’s enhancements and refinements page.
Other then the update to 64 bit in the system and many of the core apps the big ticket item is the upgraded to the services menu. In older versions of OS X the services menu appeared as a menu item in the drop-down menu under the program name in the menu bar. It contained a long list of ever service, functions provided by other applications to the system and other applications on it. Whilst this was a cool way of extending the overall functionality of the system it was not very user friendly as the list contained every service available whether you used them or not and whether they were relevant to what you were doing at the time. Having a service to rotate an image available when your editing text in a text editor is obviously as useful as proverbs on a Bull.
Well Apple have made some very significant changes. The service menu is now contextually aware so if you are editing text in a text editor you will only see the services that are relevant to the task at hand. Even more handy is the appearance of the services menu in the context menu (control+click / right click) of all applications that support this functionality and in the Action drop-down menu in finder (the button with the cog wheel icon on it). So there are at least three convenient locations you can find the services menu now.
The services menu is also configurable now. To do this all you have to do is click on ‘Service Preferences…’ in the service menu or open the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keybord preferences pane and you can switch the service on and off as you like. You can also change the keyboard shortcuts for each service. The trick is to double click on the existing shortcut (or select a service and hit enter) to make changes.
If you want to take things to the next step and create your own services you can do so with the new service template in Automator. All in all I think what Apple have done with services in Snow Leopard is brilliant and should bring the power of automation to many more Mac users. I suspect this is due in no small part to Sal Soghoian [2] the product manager for automation technologies at apple who introduced me (and about a hundred other transient BFFs) to the new services menu a few months ago.
The Mac OS X Automation web site, which was set up by Sal, is the best place to find out more about services. There are a number of service you can download from the site as well and tutorial on how to roll-your-own as well. There is a good primer article over at MacWorld and a Wikipedia entry about the service menu too.