Mac OS X Automation - Services

I mentioned earlier that the main effect of OS X Snow Leopard is to brighten the screen and free some HD space, but actually so far my favorite feature has been the revamped Services menu. Services were, apparently, very useful back in the NeXTSTEP days, but in OS X, they’ve always just been a series of cluttered menus up until now. With OS X Snow Leopard, you can not only control what items appear in your Services menu, you can also very easily build your own services using Automator and then give that service a keyboard shortcut in the System Preferences. I’ve already adapted some of my existing Python scripts so that, for example, I can highlight any text, press control-option-u, and then have that text turned into a Markdown rendered PDF that gets uploaded to my website, all in one go. It’s very handy.