Ever wanted to add services, scripts and other things to your Contextual Menus to make them smarter about offering the options you need rather than the ones that Apple thinks you deserve? Here’s how.

I’ve been keep an eye on this little gem to a while. Now it’s finally come out in a universal binary beta.

Open Menu X 0.92b installs itself as System Preference Pane that allows you to customise the contents of your contextual menus. You can add documents, applications, AppleScripts, Mac Os X Services and more so that they much more readily available:

For example, you could add your most frequently used Mail.app and other services, so that they are never more than a right-click (or ⌘-click for purists) away:

OpenMenu X supports dynamic browsing for volumes and folders, control key-free contextual menu popup, an easy-to-use menu builder and much more. It also includes over 50 helpful Sample Scripts.

OpenMenu X is shareware (USD 10). Try out the new time-limited free Intel-compatible beta from the developer’s web site .

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macOSXHints is running a tip with a couple of AppleScripts that add Contextul menus for Skype calls to your Address Book.

It includes options for dialing numbers with Skypeout and for using Skypenames.

AppleScript is, of course, excellent. It’s free, built-in and when it works gives your inner geek a nice warm glow. It is also a bit forbidding and has a time-consuming learning curve (despite what the books say).

There are other options. You can find a pre-compiled AppleScript for this in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

If you have more money than time, you might like to try two shareware solutions—BuddyPop and the Address Book menubar utility JABMenu .

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There are ways to assign hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts to just about everything.

Service Scrubber brings them to Services, FastScripts to AppleScripts, you can even roll your own for a Menu item in any app.

Now, using Shortcuts 1.0, you can add them to Contextual Menu items as well.

It only works with Contextual Menu items that are provided by plugins, like items Automator and Folder Actions add to the Contextual Menu by default.

Assigning the shortcuts is easy. The app’s window lists the items that can be assigned hotkeys. Here is a screenshot half-way through assigning one to the Automator action, “EmailObject” (something I used a lot before I discovered Quicksilver):

click on the image for a full-sized view

Another window pops up prompting you to define the keystrokes for that item, say, Command-Control-Option-E. That’s it.

Now all I have to do is highlight a file in Finder, hit the hotkey combination and the file is passed to a new message in Mail.app. Clever.

It comes with a plugin of its own, called “CocoaTextSelectionHelper” which is an optional helper to get text selection from the front text view in Cocoa applications.

Shortcuts is freeware and available from the developer’s web site where you can also find a fuller online explanation of how it works.

Related posts

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I’ve been a happy user of StickyBrain , an information manager, as long as I have used a Mac.

When Bare Bones Software launched their new information manager, Yojimbo, last week I decided to give it a go.

I’ve been using it a lot and I like it.

If you are interested in information managers and organising yourself (”productivity”), you can read the full review after the jump.

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• Quicksilver and Yojimbo 1.2
• Hawk Wings: First birthday, problems