When a doctor sticks out his hand while performing an operation, the nurse immediately knows what he’s asking for[1. At least that's what they've shown the movies. I've never seen a real medical operation in progress except for my minor surgeries]. And the nurse is always right beside the doctor; not far away hiding behind some door. I don’t exactly know where I’m going with this analogy, or whether it’s even the right one to use in this context—it’s the best one I could come up with. I’m trying to depict a scene on your Mac desktop, where you are the doctor and your Mac is the nurse.

Powerful but cluttered Services in 10.5 Leopard

I’ve talked about the services menu in a previous article, and while it’s a functional piece of technology, it was as flawed as a nurse holding out all the instruments the hospital owned while sitting inside the doctor’s office instead of the operation theatre. But that’s fix now, with Snow Leopard. The ‘no features’ release apparently brought with it a fully obedient attendant, thinking with you, and always within a keyboard shortcut’s reach.

Enough of hospital analogies, let’s get down to business. The services menu has been vastly improved in Snow Leopard: It’s cleaner, customisable, and much more integrated with your workflow. Let’s take a look at the default Services behaviours, and then customise the hell out of it.

First things first. Open up Finder, and right click an image file. See that? “Set as Desktop Picture”. Sure this should have been included a long time ago, but it’s there now. Next, go to Safari (or you already are reading this in Safari). Select some text, and go to Safari » Services. Look for yourself. Isn’t it much better than the mess it was before? Okay so there’s not a lot of ‘cool’ stuff other than creating a new email with that selected text. So we’ll fix that. Click the “Services Preferences…” (Or go to System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard shortcuts, and select Services from the list).

There’s a fairly large list to go through, but tick mark services liberally. Don’t worry, they are all context sensitive, meaning they won’t show up unless it’s relevant to your work. My favourites from the list include “Add to iTunes as spoken track”, “Visit Website”, “Create Font library from text”, “New TextEdit window containing selection”, “Show address in Map”among others. Now go back to Safari, select a bunch of text (a long article perhaps), right click, ‘Add to iTunes as spoken text’. Mac OS X will take the selected text, convert it to spoken voice using the default ‘voice’ of your computer (hopefully Alex), and add it to iTunes so you can listen to that long piece on a commute. Select a snail mail address, right-click, and prepare to be blown away.

But Services is even better than that as you begin to customise it. For starters, you can create automator actions, and plug them into your services menu. Let’s make a simple one that rotates selected images 90* clockwise.

Launching Automator will bring up the new ‘Choose template’ dialog. Selecting ‘Service’ will gear your workflow for the services menu. At the top is a thin bar where you can specify the data type, and applications in which the service will show up. For this service we only want it to show for ‘image files’ and in ‘Finder’ application. From the actions, search for the ‘Rotate image’ action, and drop it in your workflow. Choose your options, and save the service, naming it aptly.

Switching back to Finder, right-click on any image file, and the Rotate Left or Right, depending on what you named it, and watch as your productive life presents itself to you. That of course was the simplest of workflows; you can do tons with Automator. Search around the web and you will find Applescripts, shell commands, and automator actions to add to your workflow.

But, there are readymade actions and services which you can use without any work at all! I don’t quite know who runs the site—seems to be Apple but they plainly deny it at the bottom—but there’s a bunch of really useful ‘services’ for download from MacOSXAutomation.com. They’ve even got automator actions, Applescripts, and video tutorials on how to work all of this.

. Services are also being created by individuals with some knowledge of coding. Take this “Upload to Amazon S3” service for instance. Developers of course have included services with their apps for a long time now. Apps like Evernote, Notebook, CulturedCode’s Things all have services for quickly entering new data. We can only see this heightened now that services are far more useful.

I’d also like to mention a third party “Services bundle” called Kava Services. I had installed it a long time ago, but only after Snow Leopard has it become super useful. Kava Services includes services for text conversion, language translations, calculations, and a whole lot of other stuff. The best part is all of this is context sensitive, so Spanish to English will only show up if you have Spanish text selected (it does make excusable mistakes). Kava Services costs $25 for the package, and while I didn’t deem it worthy of the price the last time I mentioned services, this new way of interaction certainly makes it a worthy purchase. It’s rewritten for Snow Leopard, complete with a 64-bit binary. Check it out. I’ve also mentioned a few other ‘loose’ services in my previous article about the then Services menu; I’d suggest you check that out as well.

Once you’ve got your services sorted out much like the apps on your iPhone, it’s time to add shortcuts to them. Keyboard shortcuts are much faster than mousing around, especially if you count those tasks you repeat regularly. The fact that the Services preferences are embedded in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab is a dead giveaway that you need to make use of this feature. Just double click to the right side of the service, and perform your shortcut. From thereon, whenever that service is relevant, hitting that shortcut will execute it.

With that, I end my little tutorial, and wish you all a happy journey into Mac automation. May you never have to perform a mundane task again.