Services Menu = Broken

Services only work with Cocoa applications, not Carbon. MSFT Office stuff is greyed out, but the options are available in other things like Terminal. Though, I'm surprised Firefox isn't in Cocoa. Also, there may be some other requirement to use Services in an application, but I don't know a whole lot about it.

 

if you open up a native OSX (cocoa) application (like safari), and highlight something, you will notice the services will highlight.

but for some reason, I can never get the GRAB function to work....

 

I hate the services menu.

I hope that it's gone in tiger.

 

None of my services are available with safari, terminal, ical, mail or itunes. I gave up checking the others.

 

The services menu is designed to help applications share features with other applications. Thanks to the services menu many of my applications (which are mostly Cocoa) can now share features with each other.

So what is there to hate? Why would it need to be gone. If you don't use it, it is like it isn't there. If you make good use of it, it is why Macs are light years ahead of any other platform on the planet.

Some examples:

• Create will turn any selected text into an image (with the correct font) within the document of another Cocoa app like TextEdit. Further, if I type out something in a Cocoa app like TextEdit hand have things like bold, italic and underlined text, I can highlight the body and have Create convert it to HTML (all the tags including font tags).
• Safari in 10.3 (and a special service in 10.2) lets you highlight a word in a document in a Cocoa app and do a Google search (I have my system set up to use OmniWeb and not Safari though).
• OmniDictionary will give me the definition of any highlighted word in a document in a Cocoa app. Similarly Nisus Thesaurus can give me a definition and alternative words and place the alternate word in the document. I use both of these in the text field of OmniWeb while composing my posts (including this one).
• If I write something in a post or come across something on the internet of interest I can highlight the body of text and have it transferred into MacJournal.
• WebGrabber, RBrowser Safari and OmniWeb can open up URLs from within the body of a document in a Cocoa app (like in the body of a message in Mail).

Additionally for the Finder...

• Both Pack Up And Go and OpenUp can archive documents and folders from the service menu.
• OmniDiskSweeper can size up and help me clean folders and volumes.

You may not find this little menu of much use, and no one is forcing you to use it, but many of us who understand what it really is have made it an integral part of our computing habits. I, personally, have a hard time justifying the use of Carbon apps because they don't share. And Apple has made services available to Carbon developers (the proof is the fact that the Finder can use services and it is Carbon), they just haven't done anything with them.

This is an example of what my Service menu looks like:

 

I know Safari and Mail are both service users and service feature providers in Mac OS X.

Services generally become available once you have selected something... most remain grayed when nothing is selected.

Apple has not done that great a job of pushing services. This was mostly to keep early Carbon developers from crying foul at Apple playing favoritism with Cocoa (which was a major worry early on).

Now Apple has pushed much of services structure for Cocoa apps forward (most notably in 10.3 is the advances in text services). This underlying service infrastructure is one of the best things Apple (and third party developers) got from NeXT.