Using OS X Services
Almost everyone who reads this posting on Mac productivity is going to ask “What are OS X Services?” - except for Mac geeks, who will yawn and drop off to sleep. They don’t need to read this post anyway. Take a look at the screenshot below. You’ll notice that I’m running Apple’s Pages and I have clicked on Pages in the Menu Bar and, maybe out of sheer curiosity, I’ve clicked on “Services.” Lo and behold, another drop down menu has appeared and I’ve had the nerve to click on “Convert” provoking yet another drop down menu to clutter up the screen.
“What the hell is going on?”
OS X Services
Services have been part of OS X since it was born. The idea is that any application that wants to can offer services to other applications through this menu. So in the above menu, the applications; BBEdit, Chartsmith, EasyFind, the Finder, Journler, The Dictionary, Mail, Stickies, Preview, Script Editor, TextEdit and TextExpander are all offering their services to Pages.
The way that Services work is that you select something (usually text, but you can select images too) and whichever service you pick will take what you selected and do something with it. So in the example I’m showing here, I’ve selected a line of text from Pages and I’m applying “Initial Caps Of Words” to it. This particular service will put initial caps on the sentence I’ve selected and put it back in Pages. If you select Mail followed by Send Selection, it will take the text you’ve selected and create an email with that as the contents. This is, in effect, data passing between “objects” followed by service invocation.