Word Service

· technology ·

I've always been a big fan of Services in MacOSX. I think that they go some way to enabling the kind of complete integration between applications which would be great if it actually worked properly. I found a collection of free standalone services called Word Service, developed by Devon Technologies. There are three sets, grouped by function: 'Convert' contains options which do useful tasks like changing the case of the selection, removing quotes, or altering the encoding of line endings; 'Insert' lets you insert the contents of the path, or the current date and/or time in different formats; 'Format' does all kinds of useful things like removing multiple spaces, surplus line endings, and sorting lines alphabetically. There are all things I often find myself needing, so it's very handy to have them available in almost every application.

There seem to have been some improvements to the Services menu in Panther. Jaguar had a really irritating bug which meant that if you had more than a certain number of services, the whole menu would refuse to show up in Carbon applications. That seems to have been resolved now, which is great news.