Natural selection - the Services menu
As you might have seen already, in every application menu, there this menu item, called Services.
It’s one of the less prominent features of Mac OS X, but today we will see, how Services can make your life easier and more convenient, all from the application menu.
If we look at the entire menu, it shows us a wide range of actions.
Going through the list of commands, you see that some are grayed out, while some are active and clickable. This is because the services you can execute depend on your current selection (this might be text, an object in Finder, etc.)
Say, you have a paragraph on a webpage highlighted, you can make Mac OS X speak it to you.
From the application menu, select Services > Speech > Start speaking.
Go to System Preferences > Speech to pick a different voice. However, we suggest using the standard voice of Mac OS X Leopard (Alex) since it’s the only one, somewhat resembling a human voice.
The list of all Services is long and they are all quite self explaining, so we will not cover all Services here, just find out for yourself. There are many more.
What more can be done?
Some more example how you could use the Services menu from within any application:
* Call a Skype contact, only by highlighting the user name and picking Call from the Skype Services menu.
* Look up a highlighted word in the built-in dictionary.
* Perform a Google search with any selected text from any application.
As you go along and install applications, this menu might grow, giving you even more actions, right from the application menu.
Keyboard shortcuts for Services
As you see, some items already have keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Search With Google) so let’s add our own to the mix.
Yesterday, we had this tutorial on creating your own keyboard shortcuts for an application, which we can use for this purpose, too.
However, since the Services menu is present in every application, we need to keep the selection for an application to All Applications and use the exact name of the Service.
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Tags: Dictionary, menu bar, Safari, Services, Skype, speech
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