With the newly rewritten contextual Services in Snow Leopard, I’m looking to see how this might be of benefit with Scrivener. In the “old days”, I accessed the Scrivener Services via Quicksilver to copy or append text to a clipping in Scrivener.
Now, I’ve switched over to Launchbar and upgraded to Snow Leopard, so I’m looking for something similar. From the little I’ve seen, the rewrite of Services is going to make some of this more accessible. Unfortunately, I don’t even see any Scrivener Services available to me in the “Services Preferences…” Where did they go?
They are not obviously titled, but you should be able to find them - you need to turn them on, though, as it seems that Snow Leopard turns most services off by default. So you need to go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts, then select Services from the list on the left and look for the “Append…” and “Create Clipping” services, then enable them. After that, they should be available in contextual menus when applicable. I have yet to make up my mind whether or not I like this new way Services works, but it is interesting…
Hope that helps.
All the best,
Keith
Ah, there they are…thanks. I had looked in the preferences. Those services don’t actually say Scrivener in them, so I didn’t make the connection. They are on now, and working. Except…
The contextual services are setting me back. I’m trying to dump notes from my Logos Bible software into Scrivener. Unfortunately, Services doesn’t seem to recognize that I’m dealing with text, so the contextual services for Scrivener aren’t available.
I guess I’ll have to revert to cut and paste or try to start using the Scratch Pad.
It may be that the Logos Bible isn’t written in Cocoa (uh, the program for it, if you see what I mean, obviously I know the Bible wasn’t written in Cocoa), in which case Services may not work (that’s my guess, anyway).
I may need to add “Scrivener” to the names of the services now, which is annoying. Previously, they appeared in a “Scrivener” menu - I would have expected OS X to group them by program at least to make things easier.
There are some neat things about how Services are implemented in Snow Leopard but you you have hit on one of the problems in the implementation. We don’t know which Service component belongs to which app any more. Developers will have to make that clear in the naming of the Service.
I’ve just acctivated the services and noticed that they are listed by application but not grouped: instead there is a nice little icon of the application they belong to on the left side of the contextual menu.