Services Schmervices
Posted September 11th, 2004 @ 04:40pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Are "Services" (that menu in your Mac OS X app) as annoying to everyone else as they are to me? Jeez. I've got about a billion things in there, and each of them seem to fight over keyboard shortcuts. I want about five or six things in there. There seem to be ways to add stuff to the Services menu, but no way to trim what's already there. What's up with that?
Services, at the moment, suck. Rather, to be more correct, the management of services sucks. What management you ask? Exactly.
Donate Life
Posted 11 Sep 2004 at 5:43pm #
I almost never use services. Until recently they only worked in Cocoa applications, and even now a lot of applications don't support them, including FireFox (which I'm now using).
Posted 12 Sep 2004 at 8:52am #
The spelling service is all I ever use. I can't live without it. Camino's lack of service support is the only thing stopping me from dumping Safari.
Posted 12 Sep 2004 at 11:07am #
You might want to check out Service Manager. I use it all the time to clean out services that I will never use.
Posted 12 Sep 2004 at 1:10pm #
It's an appendix... a vestige of Unix... users don't want to go there, or need to go there, unless they have to, and developers fail to hook into the services. And users expect to solve similar problems a different way, such as dragging and dropping a text clipping or such.
I have TRIED to use them on occasion, for example, a couple of things that Explorer, and Camino/Firefox will do, that neither Safari nor OmniWeb will do, is "save (a webpage) as text". So I could, via services, open a text selection in TextEdit. It doesn't work from OmniWeb, although I can save as a "stickie", which I never use either.
Much easier is keeping BBEdit open and merely dragging text to that (or one could browse with devonNote or such).
And the handy cross application services they COULD provide, are often available some other way, with fewer moves, with simple copy to clipboard and drag and drop actions. I could select and drag to desktop or a folder, OR with Services I could select, navigate via a multitiered drop down menu to find many options greyed out, perhaps be able to choose one service, only to find it doesn't work.
Services is probably one of the most ignored features of OS X, and perhaps for good reason. Has your appendix helped you digest a meal lately?
Anyone reading this regularly and efficiently using services on a daily basis?
Posted 13 Sep 2004 at 4:48pm #
I agree that it should be easier to manage them, but I do use them every day. As a matter of fact, I'm using them to write this response. I'm typing it using Markdown syntax, which gets transformed into HTML using gu.st's HumaneText service, and then I run the result through Tidy Service.
I write my blog entries in SubEthaEdit using a similar process.
Posted 13 Sep 2004 at 5:38pm #
...except I really shouldn't do that here, as the extra paragraph tags and linebreaks are hostile in the context of Erik's comment engine. Sorry.
Posted 21 Dec 2005 at 1:54pm #
Hi Erik
I think this might interest you: http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?section=servicescrubber
Does a great work of managing the unmanageable.
Regards
jr