As everyone knows, Mail has an annoying habit of formatting hyperlinks so that they “break” when viewed in many other email clients.

Rachel Blackman has done Mail.app users a favour by creating a Mac OS X service that streamlines the process of solving the problem by using a service like TinyURL to create short, unbreakable hyperlinks.

Rachel’s “Shrink URL” service does the heavy lifting for you. It takes any highlighted URL in any editable Mac OS X text field, queries TinyURL and returns the shrunken URL, ready for emailing.

So, all I have to do after installing the service and restarting is highlight the URL:

Press the service’s shortcut key (⇧⌘T) and, hey presto, the shrunk URL is there:

That’s even slicker than the browser bookmarklet TinyURL provides.

You can get the service from Rachel’s web site and ask your questions or make suggestions on her forums .

She has also made the source code available and says that “anyone who finds the shrinkURL code useful for other things is welcome to it.”mail.app, apple mail, delsp=yes, broken hyperlinks, services, tinyurl, plugins

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 .contextual menu, shortcuts, services, applescript, hacks, productivity, mail.app, apple mail

There are lots of good ways to create iCal events and ToDos from Mail.app messages. I like to use MailTags for ToDos and Event Maker for events.

But even in the most email-focussed life, sometimes you need to make events and ToDos that are not related to an email.

Quicksilver offers at least two slick ways to deal with that quickly and efficiently.

The fastest way is provided by the Mac OS X Service, Calendar Creator. I’ve posted about Calendar Creator before. It’s great.

With the Services plugin installed in Quicksilver, creating an event is as easy as activating the interface, pressing the fullstop (or period) to access text mode, typing in something like “Coffee with Dicko next Tuesday, 10.30 am” and selcting “Add an event” from the action pane:

The “smart parsing” in Calendar Creator is an enormous time-saver. You can get this freeware Service from the developer’s web site .

A poster on the Quicksilver forums provides an AppleScript that offers another way to achieve the same thing. In fact, if you don’t use Quicksilver, it will launch just as happily from the Scripts menu or with a hotkey provided by an app like FastScripts .

Set it with a Quicksilver trigger and it presents you with a series of dialogs asking for the title, description (which goes in iCal’s Notes field), a date, start and end times and which calendar to use. This takes longer but gives you more control.ical, quicksilver, events, triggers, services, calendar creator, applescript, tips, productivity

I am a big fan of Services in Mac OS X, especially of the way that they speed me up in Mail and elsewhere.

While plugins already exist to give you access to maps for contacts in your Address Book, today Robert Stainsby released a Service that makes Google Maps and ZoomIn Australia and New Zealand maps available for the text of any address that you select in any app.

Tonight I was reading a PDF about a meeting tomorrow.

With this Service installed, all I had to do was select the text of the address in the PDF, and then select the mapping service from the Services menu:

It switches to my browser and open a map (in this case) from ZoomIn Australia that shows me exactly where I need to go:

Very nifty. I’ll can see myself using this a lot.

MappingService is donation-ware and can be downloaded from Robert’s web site .address book, Google maps, services, productivity, zoomin, maps, where do you want to go today, helpful apps

Services are a clever and neglected feature in Mac OS X, that make the functions of individual apps available system-wide.

ContactCreator is a Mac OS X service that will create an Address Book contact from selected text.

If you have one word selected, it will place it in the first name field of a new contact, two words will go into the first name and second name fields, and more than two selected words are dumped into the Notes field. It recognises email addresses and adds .Mac addresses as AIM contacts.

It is quicker than Address Book Quick Entry, although it is also obviously more “dirty”; you need to drag and drop the information into the proper fields later.

If you have Quicksilver’s Services Menu Module installed, it is also available in Quicksilver as a way to clip contacts into Address Book quickly for later tidying up.

Or you could set a hotkey for the service using Peter Maurer’s Service Scrubber and access it that way.

ContactCreator is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .address book, services, contacts, quicksilver

TextSoap, the text cleaning and formatting utility, has been updated.

The new version is more more stable and usable.

Previously, TextSoap crashed under some configurations (bad) and the Contextual Menu items would sometimes disappear (bad). Also, opening a plain text file did not always use the plain text font (annoying). But these issues are now fixed.

It also includes a work-around for working with text in Mail.app 2.x, which has a peculiar way of supporting two-way Services.

TextSoap costs USD 24.99, but a 30 day demo is available from the developer?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s web site .text, tips, helpful apps, mail.app, apple mail, textsoap, cleaning, formatting, text utilities, Services

Service Scrubber is a utility for managing your Services menu, making it easier to use Services in Mail.app (and elsewhere).

Peter Maurer has released an updated version.

The new version is smarter at detecting duplicated Services entries, works with StickyBrain‘s unusual way of specifiying its Services (hooray!), and fixes a visual glitch under 10.3.9.

Service Scrubber is donation-ware and available from Peter’s web site.