Hawk Wings » Services

A smarter solution to Mail’s hyperlink woes

Tim Gaden — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:33:50 +0000

As everyone knows, Mail has an annoying habit of formatting hyperlinks so that they â€œbreakâ€ 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 (â‡§âŒ˜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, pluginsSimilar Posts:

OpenMenu X: Roll Your Own Contextual Menus

Tim Gaden — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:59:00 +0000

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 âŒ˜-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 mailSimilar Posts:

Creating iCal events with Quicksilver

Tim Gaden — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 12:35:55 +0000

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
Similar Posts:

MappingService: Maps in a flash in any app

Tim Gaden — Thu, 25 May 2006 14:50:40 +0000

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 appsSimilar Posts:

Service to add a contact to Address Book

Tim Gaden — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 14:19:21 +0000

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
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TextSoap 4.5.2

Tim Gaden — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:08:10 +0000

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?¢‚Ç¨‚Ñ¢s web site .text, tips, helpful apps, mail.app, apple mail, textsoap, cleaning, formatting, text utilities, ServicesSimilar Posts:

Service Scrubber 1.1.1

Tim Gaden — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 23:02:39 +0000

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.Similar Posts:

Service Scrubber 1.0

Tim Gaden — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:17:59 +0000

Mac OS X’s built-in Services can help you work smarter and faster in Mail.app (and elsewhere).

Third party Services plug-ins offer even more options.

Peter Maurer, creator of Textpander, Witch and other productivity gems, has released a utility that helps you manage your Services menu.

My Services menu is clogged with services from old deleted apps and functions that I will never use. With Service Scrubber I can restructure the menu, change the keyboard shortcuts for each service and even disable unwanted ones.

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

UPDATE: As Marc Bizer points out in the comments, you can also use Service Manager, a third-party System Preference plug-in from Blacktree, to manage your services menu, although it has slightly fewer features.

UPDATE: (23 December 2005) Peter has released an updated version of the app (1.1) that finds system-owned services more easily and has some additional features.Similar Posts:

Services update: HotService and InstantLinks

Tim Gaden — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 13:15:17 +0000

Speaking of using OS X’s Services menu in Apple Mail to work smarter, two new things deserve a mention.

HotService has been updated. This bundle moves the Services out of the File menu onto the Statusbar for easier access. The new version replaces the “Services” text with a bullet to conserve Statusbar real estate and initialises the Service Menu more quickly on start-up.

InstantLinks is another Services bundle that offers quick and easy shortcuts to various useful “look-ups” on selected text:

Select an address that someone has emailed you, and Google Maps via InstantLinks gives you a handy map. Or highlight a word in a Mail.app message and InstantLinks can take you straight to its Wikipedia entry.

Command-= takes you to the dictionary definition or thesaurus on Answers.com. And so on.

Of course, while these tools help you work better in Apple Mail, by their very nature they are there to help you in any other Cocoa-based app you use.

Both bundles are freeware.Similar Posts:

TextSoap: Working smarter with text

Tim Gaden — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 22:05:32 +0000

I’ve blogged before about how I use OS X’s Services to make life easier in Apple Mail, especially about Devon’s Word Services.

Textsoap takes text manipulation to an even higher level.

It provides a graphical interface (as well as Services) for over 70 different ways of treating text, whether in Mail.app, a word processor or a text editor.

It comes with plugins for TextWrangler and BBEdit, Eudora and MailSmith and works natively with Cocoa-based apps like Apple Mail and Pages.

With AppleScript you can extend its reach to cover Entourage, Word and AppleWorks.

“Scrub” is a pre-set series of text cleaning actions that removes forwarding characters, rewraps paragraphs and more at the press of a single button. You can customise it further with the “my scrub” feature.

But the interface also offers easy access to other functions, like setting the quote level of text quickly, adding initial capitals, changing between upper and lower case and much much more.

You can use it with the built-in editor or with its plug-ins and services inside any app you choose.

Recently the ability to clean Rich Text has been added to its plain text capabilities.

TextSoap costs money (Devon’s Word Services doesn’t), but USD 24.99 is not much to pay for the time it saves if you work with decent quantities of text. A 30 day demo is available from the developer’s web site.services, rich text, text formatting, cleaningSimilar Posts: