Apr 27 2009
Services In the Contextual Menu
By: Jon Gales
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.