Introduction

Explains how Cocoa applications can extend their capabilities seamlessly to other applications.

Who Should Read This Document?

You should read this document if you are a Cocoa application developer and want to provide your application’s services to other applications or make services from other applications available to your application.

Prerequisites

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. For more information, see Information Property List Files in Runtime Configuration Guidelines .

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

Organization of This Document

Read the first three chapters to learn how services work, see examples of services in applications, and learn which properties you use to provide and use services in your applications. The remaining two chapters describe in detail how to provide and use services in your applications.

Changes for OS X v10.6

The Services feature was updated in OS X version 10.6 with the following changes and additions to properties:

A slash is no longer treated as specifying a submenu with NSMenuItem .

NSSendTypes and NSReturnTypes no longer need to be specified.

There are three new properties: NSSendFileTypes , NSServiceDescription , and NSRequiredContext .