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

 
 

Macworld's State of the Mac Reliability Survey

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Macworld has done a huge survey of over 5,000 Macintosh users to see what they liked - and didn't like - about their Macs. The survey's findings on satisfaction and reliability, repair incidents, and quality of customer service are fascinating, and be sure to read Dan Miller's thoughts about what it all means as well. Unsurprisingly, respondents were much happier with their Macs than with their PCs, even when the PC was the primary computer, with 85 percent of Macs being rated as 9 or 10 out of 10, and only 15 percent of PCs receiving the same ranking. That's even though about 25 percent of the Macs had a problem that sidelined them for a day or more. Dan suggests that the reason is that people were highly satisfied with the service they received when having their Macs repaired - a likely possibility.

 

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