waffle

The next version of ThisService will contain “Pack Up”.

You select “Pack Up Service” from the File menu and you get a list of all current ThisService-generated services on your Mac. You can pick an instructions file and rename it if you’d like, and when you click Pack Up, a zip file is generated, containing the service, your instructions file (if you selected one) and a generic “What do I do with this file?” document. If you created a this-script-is-referenced-instead-of-copied-style service (as was introduced in 1.1b1), it also resolves the reference and copies the script into the service.

The zip file is all you need to distribute. You don’t need to tell people to get ThisService, you don’t need to tell them to create text files and rename them to have funny extensions, you don’t even need to write instructions for how to install the service. I believe enormously in shortening the pipeline between “I have made a useful service” to “Other people can download my service”, and Pack Up is a way of making that happen.

To be honest, when Hosey wrote what he wrote about ThisService, I was flattered but I thought it was a load of hyperbole and wishful thinking in the end. These days, however, people are sending thanks nearly every day. Occasionally money changes hands, but mainly people are telling me that the sun blazes less harshly in the summer, the cold bites less bitterly in the winter, pleasant rain falls more often and that, oh yeah, ThisService is really neat and saves them a bunch of time and hassle regularly and that I should be commended and made president of a wondrous island somewhere in the Pacific (presumably one with high-bandwidth Internet connections, lest they want to give up on support).

I am incredibly grateful that I have been given the opportunity to brighten so many people’s days, not to mention weigh down their application menus. I really can’t tell if services have grown more popular, if the insular circle of prospective code monkeys that ThisService is currently aimed at have recently decided to give it a twirl or three, or if it’s just a case of people randomly paying it more attention at the same time. What I can tell you that it’s more than I imagined when Gruber proposed an app back in late October.