There are a couple of points to this thread.
First is to ask how many people have really started leveraging the "Services" menu? This was a truly cool concept from the NEXTSTEP days that has received precious little attention (as far as I can tell). I'm just wondering if this is because few people really know about it.
Second, what kind of improvements would you like to see to the Services menu infrastructure? Two that I can immediately think of are: making it available in (at least) Finder context menus, and a preference pane for customizing the services that are visible and perhaps thir keyboard short-cuts.
Finally, what kind of services can you envision being provided by various applications like iPhoto, iCal, AddressBook, etc.
Let me explain how services works to help you think about this...
For those who aren't familiar with it, the Services infrastucture leverages the pasteboard ("clip board" for the Mac-o-philes) services. What pasteboard services do is enable an application to copy/paste multiple representations of some data element (typically something selected in the UI) to be copied/pasted through the pasteboard (this is how copy/paste works).
So, for example, say that you had some nicely formatted RTF text in TextEdit selected. When you copy this selection, it's RTF and plain text representations are put on the pasteboard. When you go to paste this data somewhere, the application you are pasting to will look at the representations on the pasteboard and pick the best one for its purposes. It might not support RTF for example and only plain text will do.
Another example might be a spreadsheet, where you have a range of cells selected. When copying, the application could copy a plain text (i.e., comma separated value) representation of the selection, an RTF representation, an image representation, and a private, very rich representation of the data, relationships, formatting and formulas. Then wherever you paste to has a variety of choices to paste from. If it understands the rich version, it may use that.
So...services works by allowing any application to publish functions that it can perform based on the pasteboard data types that are available for a given selection. For example if the item current selected is a file (or a list of files), some application may have a service that will work on a file (or files) and provide a service like "encrypt" in the services menu. This service will be available whenever a file is selected.
Another example might be a service that generates anagrams. This service would work with selected text. Whenever some text was selected, in the services menu would be this service that will take the selected data, generate some anagrams, and return the selected data (through the pasteboard).
Services are like a "copy/paste middle man", where something useful/intelligent/silly/etc. happens between the copy and the paste.
Services can also just grab the data and do something like (assume the selected text is a URL) open a web page.
So...what more cool things could there be?
First is to ask how many people have really started leveraging the "Services" menu? This was a truly cool concept from the NEXTSTEP days that has received precious little attention (as far as I can tell). I'm just wondering if this is because few people really know about it.
Second, what kind of improvements would you like to see to the Services menu infrastructure? Two that I can immediately think of are: making it available in (at least) Finder context menus, and a preference pane for customizing the services that are visible and perhaps thir keyboard short-cuts.
Finally, what kind of services can you envision being provided by various applications like iPhoto, iCal, AddressBook, etc.
Let me explain how services works to help you think about this...
For those who aren't familiar with it, the Services infrastucture leverages the pasteboard ("clip board" for the Mac-o-philes) services. What pasteboard services do is enable an application to copy/paste multiple representations of some data element (typically something selected in the UI) to be copied/pasted through the pasteboard (this is how copy/paste works).
So, for example, say that you had some nicely formatted RTF text in TextEdit selected. When you copy this selection, it's RTF and plain text representations are put on the pasteboard. When you go to paste this data somewhere, the application you are pasting to will look at the representations on the pasteboard and pick the best one for its purposes. It might not support RTF for example and only plain text will do.
Another example might be a spreadsheet, where you have a range of cells selected. When copying, the application could copy a plain text (i.e., comma separated value) representation of the selection, an RTF representation, an image representation, and a private, very rich representation of the data, relationships, formatting and formulas. Then wherever you paste to has a variety of choices to paste from. If it understands the rich version, it may use that.
So...services works by allowing any application to publish functions that it can perform based on the pasteboard data types that are available for a given selection. For example if the item current selected is a file (or a list of files), some application may have a service that will work on a file (or files) and provide a service like "encrypt" in the services menu. This service will be available whenever a file is selected.
Another example might be a service that generates anagrams. This service would work with selected text. Whenever some text was selected, in the services menu would be this service that will take the selected data, generate some anagrams, and return the selected data (through the pasteboard).
Services are like a "copy/paste middle man", where something useful/intelligent/silly/etc. happens between the copy and the paste.
Services can also just grab the data and do something like (assume the selected text is a URL) open a web page.
So...what more cool things could there be?
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