Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Services

Apple has always dreamed of a software architecture that would let you mix and match features from different programs—the Mac’s spell checker in Microsoft Word, the drawing tools of PowerPoint in your email, and so on. (Remember Apple’s OpenDoc software project? Neither does anybody else.)

For several generations of Mac OS X, a menu called Services sat in every single program’s Application menu, listing such interchangeable functions. And for all those years, most people pretty much ignored them.

That’s because the Services menu was baffling. It listed all kinds of weird commands. Most of them, most of the time, were dimmed and unavailable. None of them were described or explained anywhere. They sort of felt like a mistake.

But things changed with Snow Leopard, when Apple gave Services an extreme make-over, in hopes of making them useful again. In Lion, they continue to make forward strides (though they’re still a little baffling).

Services commands are contextual, meaning that they show up only when relevant; when a photo is selected, the text-related commands don’t appear. In Lion, Services can filter out unnecessary material automatically. Run a command on a phone number, for example, and Services are smart enough to ignore any other inadvertently selected text.

Lion also makes it a snap to install Services. As with Dashboard Widgets and Safari plug-ins, you just double-click a Service’s icon (you can download tons of them). Lion asks if you want to install it (Figure 7-2 ...