This issue comes a day early since I'm spending much of the week at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Hypertext here in Seattle. Monday night I hope to attend a reception in honor of Ted Nelson, the father of hypertext and creator of the Xanadu system. If you want to read more about Ted Nelson and Xanadu, I suggest you dig back into the TidBITS archives for TidBITS #30, in which Ian Feldman focused on Xanadu. And of course, I'll have a report on the entire conference, probably in next week's issue.
Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.
Mac OS X Services in Snow Leopard
Mac OS X Services let one application supply its powers to another; for example, a Grab service helps TextEdit paste a screenshot into a document. Most users either don't know that Services exist, because they're in an obscure hierarchical menu (ApplicationName > Services), or they mostly don't use them because there are so many of them.
Snow Leopard makes it easier for the uninitiated to utilize this feature; only services appropriate to the current context appear. And in addition to the hierarchical menu, services are discoverable as custom contextual menu items - Control-click in a TextEdit document to access the Grab service, for instance.
In addition, the revamped Keyboard preference pane lets you manage services for the first time ever. You can enable and disable them, and even change their keyboard shortcuts.
Submitted by
Doug McLean
Published in TidBITS 202.
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- Mark H. Anbinder
- Chris Jackson
- Communicate Coughing
- Macintosh Quadra 610, DOS Compatible
- Dreaded NDN Revisited
- Macintosh TV: It Slices, It Dices
- BBEdit: Not Quite Bare Bones
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