If there is one area of Mac OS X most over-looked and under-used it must be the Services menu. Many Macaholics don’t even know it exists, and those who do complain it is too long and stuffed with junk. The Services menu is found under the second entry in the Mac’s menu bar—usually the name of the current active application, including the Finder.

Services are one of the prizes won from choosing NeXT as the basis for Mac OS X. They are, in effect, tiny applets that enhance whatever program is running, be it Carbon or Cocoa, as long as it is services-aware. Firefox is not one, which for us marks it down as a definite runner-up for the lack of services support; but then, neither QuarkXPress nor Word is services-aware. Entries under Services will be greyed-out if a program is not written to use them.

For an example of services in action, sweep across a paragraph or more of text to highlight it and select Summarize from the Services menu. The resulting window has the text with a slider control to create a summary dynamically, even reducing it to the barest minimum. This can be very useful in dealing with long reports or to shorten documents.

Perhaps the text came from the Web and has funny line endings. Because we have installed WordService, we can strip those out as well as making it all capitals, lower case, or sentence capitals, as well as deleting multiple spaces. That’s not to mention sorting lists into alphabetical order and creating proper curly quotes, or converting curly quotes to straight ones.

There are many free and incredibly useful services, including WordService and CalcService, which does for figures what its sibling application does for text. Googling will find many more.

Or it is easy(ish) to write your own. Philippe Mougin explains how, using Bellhop, a shareware script editor.