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Introduction to System Services

Contents:

Organization of This Document

Services give applications an open-ended way to extend each other’s functionality by allowing applications to

• provide services to other applications

• access functionality provided by other applications

The shared functionality is accessed through the Services submenu of every application’s application menu. An application does not need to know in advance what operations are available; it merely needs to indicate the types of data it uses, and the Services menu makes available the operations that apply to those types of data.

Organization of This Document

This document describes how Mac OS X services work, shows some typical Services menus, and provides instructions on how you can use services in your application. You should read this document if you are an application developer and want to provide your application’s services to other applications or make services from other applications available to your application.

Before you read this document, you should be familiar with information property lists. You need to know what they are and how to add properties to a list. See “Information Property Lists” for more information.

For guidelines on naming menu items and designing the interface for a services application, see Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

Here are the concepts covered:

• “Services Architecture”

• “Items in the Services Menu”

• “Services Properties”

Here are the tasks covered:

• “Providing a Service”

• “Using Services”

• “Creating the NSServices Property”

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