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

 

 

Recent TidBITS Talk Discussions
 
 

Internet Resources Corrections

Chuq Von Rospach of Apple wrote to correct and comment on the article about Apple's Internet resources in TidBITS-233. We got the URL for the Apple Business Systems FTP server slightly wrong - the best one is:

ftp://abs.apple.com/abs/

The idea is that when the great coherency campaign begins (and Chuq has plans for it already), that directory will be easy for the other Apple FTP sites to mirror, making it easier to bounce from one to another.

Chuq noted also that the easiest way to get information about and subscribe to the MAE mailing lists is to send email to <listproc@abs.apple.com> with "info mae-users" in the body of the message. The reply walks you through the entire subscription process. In addition, he recommended checking <ftp.support.apple.com> for files before going to the other sites, either via FTP or Gopher at:

ftp://ftp.support.apple.com/pub/
gopher://ftp.support.apple.com/11/pub

Gilbert Rankin <gilbert@netcom.com> found another public Apple FTP site, this one containing information on Macintosh Common Lisp and Dylan, an object-oriented programming tool, at:

ftp://ftp.cambridge.apple.com/pub/

Finally, Peter Lewis just released Anarchie 1.2.1 to fix some small bugs, and I noticed among the new bookmarks an Apple ATG site (that didn't seem to have anything useful on it, except maybe MPW GCC) at:

ftp://atg.apple.com/pub/

And, for those of you who are curious, I got the new copy of Anarchie from:

ftp://mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/info-mac/comm/ tcp/anarchie-121.hqx

 

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