Service station - Share your workflows

Software
1

Hi there,

Any power user on Services Station on MPU?

It is a tool that lets you define rules for customizing apps and scripts available when right clicking on a file.

  • The rules are very similar to what you would find in Hazel or Houdahspot allowing you to combine conditions based on the file extension / name / etc…
  • You can then select the applications showing up at the root of the right click menu (it saves you from having to go into “open in …”)
  • You can also list file scripts that you can trigger from the same right click menu

Nothing new under the sun but a neat little tool to have an easier time making your right-click menu more useful.

Any interesting workflows around this tool? For now I am merely using it from the apps listing perspective but I’d be interested in learning what you guys use it for. And anyway, just wanted to share about Services station which definitely has its spot as a topic here.

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2

Thanks for creating a topic for Service Station!

I’m the developer and would love to hear from any Mac Power Users about their workflows.

The big ones I use (and why I wrote the app) are:

  • Opening Terminal from any Finder location by right-clicking on the folder background.
  • Opening any/all files in Textmate, which I do all the time for various configuration files.
  • Keeping Preview as the default “open” app for images, but putting an image editor such as Pixelmator in the right-click menu for easy access.

The scripting support is also very powerful - let me know how you’re using it.

David wrote up a nice review of the app on MacSparky:

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Interesting - what does this do that OnMyCommand doesn’t? It has been blocked from most uses for teh last few years of MacOS updates and I haven’t installed it recently but I used to have a ton of scripts in it that I’ve since migrated to Alfred.
https://free.abracode.com/cmworkshop/on_my_command.html

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I’m guessing that OMC hacked the Finder process to insert menu items, similar to what Dropbox used to do. That’s all surely disallowed in newer versions of macOS with System Integrity Protection.

Service Station uses the modern Finder Sync Extension framework to add items to the Finder context menu. Fully Apple-blessed, sandboxed, and available on the Mac App Store.

menu_image

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Nice. But how do I pass the selected file as an argument to a script?

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Please see the readme within the Sample Scripts folder, available via the System Setup tab.

Finder Sync Variables

Service Station exposes the following variables to scripts:

  • targetedURL - current Finder directory path
  • selectedItemURLs - array of the selected items in Finder
  • menuKind - the type of menu being displayed

These variables correspond to the pieces of information available in the Finder Sync extension FIFinderSyncController class.

The Service Station sample scripts demonstrate how to populate these variables within your script.

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Thanks - I didn’t see that. A Help file would be nice, and/or include this info. in the readme on GitHub - just because a settings panel isn’t the obvious place to look for help.

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8

This is super handy, thanks!

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Service Station v2020.6 updated today with fixes for the template app icon shown for external disks in the Finder sidebar:

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More information here: https://github.com/knurling/ServiceStation/issues/40

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hey @pkamb, service station seems to not show up after I upgraded to Sonoma? Is the app still being developed? (This is absolutely one of those apps I absolutely love, and didn’t realize how much until I could no longer use it anymore)

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The support page is hosted on this github repository, and there is an unanswered issue filed there related to Sonoma. There is also a email address you could try.

I am going to be very disappointed if Service Station does not work on Sonoma.

1 Like
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I tried that a several months ago, and received no reply.

The GitHub repository shows the last updates were three years ago. The last time the developer commented on an issue appears to have been in 2020. The twitter feed dead as well.

I’m thinking Service Station is abandonware. Disappointing for sure.

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Yeah that’s the impression I got as well, a real shame, but understandable I guess. I was recommended to try Context Menu (in the app store) as an alternative, haven’t tried it yet though

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I thought that might be the case. Unfortunately the code isn’t on github.