Don’t forget that many Macs are used in organizations where some sort of systems management is in effect. (Not all organizations will use management software that uses tripwire the way Radmind does, though … many will instead focus on installer-based technologies.)

The overridden Info.plist could be captured in a Radmind overload and thus applied in subsequent tripwire/update runs. But to do that in a modular fashion, an admin would probably want to capture one transcript per application (and possibly per version, given the other data in the Info.plist).

However, by repositioning the menu, it also means that the keyboard shortcuts for services can block the shortcuts for applications — definitely not what you want, with few exceptions. Service Scrubber is pretty much essential for sane keyboard shortcuts, in this set-up.

My only criticism of the application is a minor usability issue… [W]hen only one service is listed for a particular application, it shows up in the list by service name. It’s hard to tell at a glance which application these services belong to.

There’s a simple solution for this. Open the app’s Preferences and check: Show service providers in “Services Menu” view.

Apple should buy Service Scrubber from Many Tricks and make this part of the standard user experience.

Sounds like Apple Menu Options. I’d rather have Apple rethink the services UI instead, and really fix it (i.e. figure out a way to avoid invoking user’s desire to edit the thing).

ICeCoffEE looks like a terrific idea, but it has its own drawbacks. It’s based on ApE and I’ve had nothing but trouble with it :-\

Hi,

If you’re having issues with ICeCoffEE please let me know. I’m not aware of any outstanding bugs that I haven’t fixed or documented. You can email me at icecoffee at sabi.net.

Also—the odd thing is that NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP did support editing of the service menu. No idea why we lost it.

–Nicholas

1. Nicholas Riley’s Icecoffee places a services menu in your contextual menu (or menu bar) and filters the services in there without manipulating the applications. Which has both the advantage of making Services easily accessible and not requiring you to ‘refresh’ the deactivated services after upgrading an application.

2. The is a function called NSSetShowsServicesMenuItem in Cocoa. Unfortunately it never actually did anything in MacOS X. And recently it has been marked deprecated as well. Perhaps it’s worth to lobby Apple a bit with regard to making this function work properly. As a properly supported way of turning these menu items on and off would certainly be the best solution for everybody.