588: macOS Services, with Sal Soghoian

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Nice show. Very interesting hearing Sal Soghoian – let’s hope Apple continues to honor and expand his legacy.

(Grabbed Service Station – it’s a bit buggy and rough.)

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Same for my Google-hosted account

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Same for my Gmail! Here I was thinking it had been an issue with just my email/Spark…

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How did Brett Terpstra’s fantastic services not get a mention??

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David mentioned the System Preferences pane being a mess. I think Sal referred to it as a college dorm closet. I was waiting for one of them to mention how to fix/improve that, but no one did.

I also thought that I had written a post about this here, but I couldn’t find it, so I wrote a separate post about it (now I’m sure someone will link to the old post that I missed).

Rather than hijack this thread, I posted it separately here:

David, Stephen and Sal inspired me to install WordService and Text Case. After doing so, WordService and its various offerings showed up in the Services section of System Preferences (Keyboard > Shortcuts), but Text Case did not. Does anyone know the trick to get it there?

Mic Drop @MacSparky about the app service station and one drive finder integration icons (dropbox as well). I have not been able to figure this out for months (well on big sir) and I hear you say that today and it all becomes clear (remove service station)! This is why I love MPU! Keep up the great work!

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I managed to get the Dropbox icons to show up correctly while still being able to use Service Station by following the instructions that I found here:

Specifically:

If you reverse the order and Enable Dropbox PRIOR TO enabling Service Station, the Dropbox finder icons are shown.

  1. Disable Service Station extension.
  2. Note that Dropbox icons are now shown!
  3. Enable Service Station extension.
  4. Dropbox icons are still shown.
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I really liked hearing Sal talk passionately about bringing creative power and satisfaction to users doing everyday things. Glad David’s couple of questions turned to much more!

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As much as I love Service Station, I find that I regularly have to go to Activity Monitor and kill all of its processes and then coax it back to life.

I hope the developer gets enough business to keep working on it. Been my favorite new Mac utility in ages.

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Credit for that actually goes to @ismh. He figured out the problem.

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Sadly still went into Spam for me :frowning:

Kinda surprised by the number of people getting the show notes by email, didn’t realize it was such a popular workflow. For DEVONThink users, you could easily add the RSS feed to DEVONThink if it’s about archiving them/reading them somewhere a bit more foolproof.

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Concerning the hidden system preferences for services under “keyboard”:
I believe the easiest way to access it is actually choosing “services” in any application and at the bottom choose “services settings”. That takes you directly to it…

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On my M1 Macs, I’m seeing TextCase stuff in the services menu. It just isn’t showing up on my work (Intel) iMac.

Well, I learn something every minute. Sorry to be misleading.

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Great episode. It brought the unconsciousness for the known services option back to my consciousness.
The paragraph sort triggered me. As I do copy a lot of text regularly from Word to Drafts, perform am alphabetical sort, and copy it back to Word. The explained service for sorting paragraphs could eliminate a lot of steps.
However, the service works in all text applications except in MS Word. See attached screen shots. Any clue?


2021-05-27_17-25-29

I’m afraid Word has its own way for dealing with text on macOS, so Services like this one will not work properly.

That said, Word has sorting paragraphs feature natively built on both macOS and iOS. In its macOS version, it’s right there in the Home Tab:
Captura de Tela 2021-05-27 às 15.29.02

How embarrassing :slight_smile: That is the easiest automation… Thanks for the eye opener.

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