OS X - Services [AKA - That weird menu you've never used before]...

OK, so how many of you have actually ever used that Services menu?

How many of you know where it is let alone what it does?

It took me a good three years to work out what it was for and longer than that to start using it properly. Even now I still don't make full use of it.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, click on the Application menu (i.e: if you're reading this in Safari click the Safari menu) and you'll see an option called Services. If you go in to it, or for that matter have ever looked at it before you will probably struggle to work out what use it is as most of the options are greyed out... That is until you select some text.

Go ahead, select the above paragraph then go back to the Services menu and see what happens, all of a sudden you have lots of options and choices that you can make use of.

Options
The one that I found the single most useful was "Make New Sticky Note" which takes the selected text and drops it in to a sticky for you. I'm a big fan of Stickies and use them daily so this was really useful to me.

While the default options are pretty good, there are also hundreds of extensions that you can use with the menu and a lot of applications install their own Services options by default.

From mine I can select a piece of text and call that name in Skype, if I select a file in finder I can go to Services and select "Send File to Bluetooth Device..." which will send it off to my phone.

Extras
An application called WordService adds "Convert" and "Format" Services options which you can use for example if you accidentally hit CAPS LOCK AND HAVE TYPED HALF A SENTENCE LIKE THAT BEVORE YOU'VE NOTICED... All you need to do in this case is select the text, go to Services >> Convert >> Lowercase. You can also do things like sort lines of text in to alphabetical order. A similar app called CalcService lets you do similar things with calculations.

There are some applications that won't work with services but most will work fine. Microsoft are a particularly bad one for not making use of the Services menu.

Along with the extra services you can add you can also make use of HotService, which places Services in the Menu bar next to the Window menu for easier access and there is another one which places it in the contextual menu so you can access it with a right click (or ctrl + click).
One thing that can be very useful if your Services menu is cluttered is Service Manager which lets you choose what gets displayed in the menu and keep it tidier.

You can get some of the extra mentioned options here: http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/services.html and there are MANY more out there.

Have a play with it and see what you can do, it takes a bit of getting used to but with the right extensions having a systemwide menu with customisable actions is priceless and something that I'm now using almost daily.

Check it out.

:o)