Chapter 20. Services
One of the most underrated parts of OS X is the system services. On OPENSTEP, every application had a top-level Services menu. On OS X, this was relegated to a submenu of the application menu. A large part of the reason for this was marketing. When OS X was launched, the majority of applications were ported from MacOS 9, using the Carbon API, and Carbon applications could not use Services. Making a user interface element prominent when most applications couldn’t use it would not have been a good idea.
This limitation no longer applies. Services can now be used by any application that uses pasteboards. The system-wide spell checker is an example of a service that is pervasive throughout OS X. It does not expose itself via ...
Get Cocoa® Programming Developer’s Handbook, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
