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
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Published in TidBITS 436.
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The Tilery 4.0 Squares Off
The Tilery 4.0 Squares Off -- Rick Holzgrafe of Semicolon Software today released The Tilery 4.0, the latest version of his $15 shareware desktop launcher application. (TidBITS looked at the previous version in "Desktop Launchers, Part IV" in TidBITS-278.) The Tilery provides graphical tiles that, when clicked, open applications, documents, folders, volumes, control panels, and servers. In addition, automatic tiles appear for currently active applications. New features in version 4.0 include tile pop-up menus for access to additional features, keyboard control, hot keys for tiles, working sets of tiles, and editable tile text labels. The Tilery 4.0 is a 442K download.
<http://www2.semicolon.com/Rick/Tilery.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/01479>
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