So, several links too late, it’s time to introduce ThisService.
Mac OS X has a concept of “services”. They hang around in a submenu inside the application menu. You can select something and use one kind of services to make another app do something - ie Safari has an “Open URL” service opening the URL currently selected. You can choose another type of service and have an application output something that doesn’t need input - ie a service that could return the current time in a special format. There’s also a third type of service that processes the selection and outputs something else - ie Script Editor’s service to return the result of the selected text executed as an AppleScript.
Services are awesome in theory. They’re almost everything you’ve needed to go to a command line for, elevated to an easily accessible menu. Somehow, though, they’re not popular. I’ve tried several times to get accustomed to them, to start using them, but it’s been hard. Only some applications have services. There’s almost no standalone services. There’s no official means of rearranging and tending the Services menu (although Service Scrubber is awesome). The right push behind services just isn’t there, and this is exactly what I think ThisService could help change.
ThisService lets you easily turn more or less any script into a service. Bam. Just like that. You no longer need mad Objective-C (or Java) coding skillz to make a service. It’s suddenly much easier to make a service, and this brings me immense joy.
I won’t lie to you. For the reasons stated above, I didn’t care one whit about services as late as last Friday. Gruber posed the idea of ThisService (although not its name, which I’m entirely to blame for) as a challenge to me and I took it because I saw a good programming challenge in it. However, I’ve had something of an aha moment during development and testing of this - much like Growl during development of Gmail+Growl, actually - and suddenly I’m seeing the potential for services everywhere. It may be the delusional, legendary hammer-nail scenario, but I seriously want to believe that there’s a truth at the core of this, and something tells me others have felt the same too.
The response to ThisService has been through the roof, out of the park, generally exceeding a lot of venues in a lot of metaphors. I’m happy, but I’m also very intrigued of what could grow out of this.