Service-

Apr 27 2009

At Your Service– Third Party Services for Mac OS X

One of the most unique and unused new features of OS X is support for “services”.
While OS X comes with it’s own set of services, today we’ll look into several free third-party system additions.

The same architecture that brings a system wide spell checking feature opens the door for a slew of enhancement for your Cocoa applications.

First, a note on “services”. These handy little applications live in their own little Services folder. Where that folder is located determines who gets to use the service. If you want all the users on your system to have use of the service, place it in the (hard drive)/Library/Services folder. To limit a services use to one user, place it in the /users/(username)/Library/Services folder.

cocoAspell

As mentioned, OS X comes complete with a spell check. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ve found the spell check useful, but not always as capable of supplying useful alternatives. This is a weakness cocoAspell addresses. This alternative to the built-in spell check comes with a preference panel that lets you set a slew of options.

SearchGoogle

This handy service takes highlighted text from any Cocoa application and opens a Google search results window for it. Nothing complicated here. The service will use your default browser defined in your Internet pane of System Preferences. You can access this command from the application/services menu or with it’s keyboard shortcut shift-command-G.

OpenService

As simple as the previous, this service takes a highlighted URL and sends it to your browser. The keyboard shortcut got this service is command-/. A note for OmniWeb users: you don’t need this as OmniWeb comes with its own “open with OmniWeb” service.

AntiWordService

A very useful service for anyone, well, anti-Word. This service enables a text editing Cocoa application to open Word documents. Now, before you get too excited, realize that the service only handles text, and throws out formating and images. In truth, AntiWordService only strips out the formating and Word specific file data. Good for recovering text from Word documents, but not much more.

Thanks for joining me for a fresh load for freeware. Come back next week for more.

Brian

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Apr 27 2009

Free Blogware

Personal web logging is the Internet’s newest craze. To do it right you’ll want the best tools. Check out my picks for Mac blogging…

The Service

In order to blog, you’ll need to sign up for the service with one of several providers (unless you are on a server that supports scripting, then you can run your own). Blogger, arguably the best of the bunch, actually creates your blog and FTP’s it to your site. As an option, you can host your blog for free with them, but for an off-site blog I might look into Blog-City or tBLOG. They are both free, but won’t likely work with the software below.

The Software

While not required, client-side software can make posting content to your blog site quicker and easier. My favorite posting tool is BlogScript. This is a simple AppleScript that remembers your login information and quickly posts the contents of your clipboard to your blog.

For more features you may want to try BlogWorkz or iBlog. Both are more robust applications that allow easy posting to your blog, but I found them less consistent than the simple script.

Direct RSS

Blogging not your thing? How about creating your own RSS news feed? RSS feeds can be subscribed to by a slew of news readers. Direct RSS allows you to create and maintain your own RSS feed. It even takes care of the uploading (though that part didn’t work so well for me) and saves a local version of your .rss file to your hard drive.

Now that you’re all hooked up with the tools, you can express yourself with easy on the web. Now all you need is something to say. But I’ll leave that up to you.

Brian

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Apr 27 2009

Master The Services Menu

By: Jon Gales

If you’d like to submit a topic for a future PowerUser Monday please let
me know.

OS X introduced a lot of new things for Mac users… Most of them good. One
of the biggies that most people still don’t use is the Services menu. You know
that thing off the Application menu that seems to always have what you want
grayed out? That’s it. Hopefully this article will help dymystify it a bit…
Maybe you’ll even learn to love it.

What’s Been Said

Myth
Services are only used by Cocoa Applications.
I subscribed to this, but then had a talk with a Cocoa/Carbon programmer.
It’s insanely easy to use services in Cocoa… It takes some work in Carbon.
They can be used in both. However, you’ll find most Carbon apps don’t use it
(it’s possible though just look at the Finder having services).

Myth
Invariably the option I want isn’t available (it’s grayed out).
I know it seems like that… You just have to learn how to
use the services menu. There’s only one exception I know of… Grab’s menu.
Only seems to work in TextEdit.

Using Services

With those out of the way, let’s get on to the meaty stuff. Here’s what
a typical services menu looks like (perhaps minus the Bluetooth option):

default services Master The Services Menu

Here’s what mine looks like after some apps I have added to it:

my services Master The Services Menu

The one I use most often is Subscribe In NetNewsWire which puts
my selection into my subscription list for one of my favorite apps of all
time…
NetNewsWire. If you
don’t use it but have broadband you’re probably not fit to be a Mac user.
Brent posted a great
video of how to subscribe via the services menu that you should
check out (even if you don’t use NNW, because it will convince you how handy
services are).

Most services use text in some way, for example if you’re at a website that
has a killer joke and you want to send it to a friend, you can just highlight
the text, go to the services menu, hit Mail and then choose send selection.
It will open Mail.app (if needed) create a new message, and make the body
the text you selected. A real time saver!

Try out some of the others now that you know most of them rely on selected
text in an app that supports them (try using Safari or Camino instead of
Internet Explorer).

Getting More

There are tons of third party services that you can snag for free. Just searching
for ‘service’ on MacUpdate yielded tons of results.

If you find a service that’s just too cool to not tell everyone about, send
it to me and if it really is cool, I’ll add it to the list below.

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