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Services is one of my favorite OS X features. My heaviest use of Services is to transfer selected blocks of text or whole Web page content from browsers to Tex Edit Plus or DEVONThink without cutting and pasting, and accessing the built-in OS X spellchecker, but there are plenty of other things that Services can do for you. Devon Technologies offers a raft of Services feature add-ons as freeware that you can download at http://www.devon-technologies.com. (However, note that a bug in OS X disables Services access in Carbon applications if there are a large number of selections in the Services menu) A new addition to my Servces menu is Nisus Thesaurus, developed as a companion to the new Nisus Writer Express word processor, and which Nisus Software is also offering as a freeware download that can be accessed by any application from the Services menu. 
Using Nisus Thesaurus is easy. Just select a word in your favorite application and choose "Nisus Thesaurus" from the "Services" sub-menu. When you select a word in Nisus Thesaurus, the synonyms for that word will be shown right next to it in the Word Browser. Go from "sky" to "cumulonimbus" in just a few clicks. Nisus Thesaurususes the WordNet lexical reference database, and knows over 120,000 words and how they relate to each other. When you lookup a word in Nisus Thesaurus, it will show you related words in six catagories. With its built-in dictionary, Thesaurus knows that sometimes the same word means different things. So it will never confuse the related words for "an orange" and "the color orange." 
I find that Nisus Thesaurus works well with various applications. There is a slight lag in its window appearing -- at least on my 700 MHz iBook -- but that's not a big deal for this sort of reference function. Once the window opens, response is very quick. I'll be using this one a lot. Check it out. If you work with words, especially with text editors that don;t have built-in thesauruses of their own, you really should have this one.
Nisus Thesaurus features
New in this version:
System requirements:
Nisus Thesaurus is freeware
For more information, visit:
More Favorite (And Not So Favorite) OS X Features? PDF Viewer Dock Preferences and Finder Preferences Issues From Patrick Taw Hi Charles, I have finally chosen to actually use a different Finder view option besides the traditional icon view. Column view is not good, but List view is great! Since a lot of my titles are long, List makes it easier to read. So now my problem is to make all the windows show as a list and its really annoying to do that for every single window. I also want to know if there is a shortcut to make the title column and the other information columns the same lengths for all of the windows without having to manually adjust them one by one? I also would like to know if it is possible to make all finder windows open with the same dimensions. Why do spring loaded folders open at different sizes? It is really annoying to have windows with really small areas but containing lots of folders. I had to drop my item into the offending window to keep it open and then adjust it. I think its so frustrating to not have any universal preferences for window size or column size. Is there a utility to make List view have 2 lines of text for the large icon size? Can I make the Finder more like navigating a web page? I don't mind the double clicking, but I really want to have the ability to ctrl_click on a folder and open that folder in a new finder window. I know that an intermediate step is to open all folders in a new window option, but that makes the desktop so cluttered. I just keep opening folders in the same window but sometimes I need to move an item to the previous window and need that "open in new window" option. Maybe an applescript for such little problems? Thanks. Moving along, I have a problem with the Dock. I like the Dock in general, but some of its behavior is very annoying. The most annoying is the left-right shifting of the icons. I like to put my folders that I access most frequently in my dock. I usually save to my desktop all my work and internet downloads so it is easy to find quickly. After I save, I need to drop the item into one of my folders residing in the dock. But when I try to drop it, the folder moves either left or right. I wonder if there is a way to make the right half of the dock permanently stable like the trash can. If it is stable permanently, then all of my minimized icons have to go somewhere. Is there a program that creates a dock that just holds minimized items? I know of windowshade and its minimize in place option, but I feel its not polished enough. Thanks for your help.
Sincerely,
P.S. Is there a way to make folders spring loaded from the dock?
Hi Patrick;
You can set the size of new Finder windows and where on the screen they open.
First close all open Finder windows, and then open one new window (File . New Finder Window or Command-N). Set up the size and location of this window manually, and then close the window without selecting anything in it.
From now on, any new window you create (by choosing File . New Finder Window or pressing Command-N) will appear at the location you set and at the size you specified.
You can also set various Finder window preferences using the Show View Options dialogs form the View Menu and make them apply to all windows or just the one you're working in. This would can to all Folders whether in spring-loaded or click to open mode.
To the best of my knowledge, the extended text information option for icons only works in Icon View mode. The upper right hand corner of Finder windows contains a little elongated oval button, which when clicked shifts window behavior to something approximating the way windows work in OS 9. The window toolbar disappears and double-clicking a folder will now open a new window rather than changing the contents of an already open window. You can always return to the OS X way of doing things by clicking the little oval button again.
As for the Dock, several utilities offer the option of "pinning" the Dock to one corner of the screen. TinkerTool is a popular and free example:
Doing this keeps the Trash where you expect it to be so it never tries to move out of the way when you are dragging an item over to it, and makes icon positioning in the Dock more predictable. Keeping an icon of the hard drive in the Dock allows you to control click and easily navigate to any folder via nested file lists, sort of like the Windows "Start" menu. The Dock will expand away from the pinned corner. There are a gazillion Dock and Dock substitute utilities that provide a variety of variations for Dock performance. I quite like the minimize in place mode of WindowShade X. Have you checked out the latest version, in which this feature has been tweaked and refined somewhat? If you click and hold on a Dock folder icon, it will eventually spring open in list view, although you can speed this up by Control-clicking. I'm not sure if those functions will do exactly what you want them to, but you can check them out to see. Also see Jonathan's comments below. Charles More Favorite (And Not So Favorite) OS X Features? From Jonathan Tyzack Hi Charles, My fifteen favourite features (as it turned out and this is on top of the obvious ones of stability and pre-emptive multi-tasking) in no particular order:
1. Menu Extras/Docklings:
Just for the sake of completeness here are my top problems with OS X:
1. Inconsistency.
Cheers,
Hi Jonathan;
I mostly agree with your observations, or at least don't disagree. For example, I find save as PDF relatively useless for my purposes at this point in time, but I'm sure it's a boon for those who have need for it. I do wish there was an option to save screenshots is a more useful (at least to me) format, but my workaround these days is to just use the option key and save them to the Clipboard and from thence into a graphics app to save.
I don't see the beach ball a whole lot any more with the iBook except when I get up to 13 or 14 swapfiles on the go, at which point a restart is called for. As far as I'm concerned, the touted UNIX advantage of being able to go for weeks or months without rebooting seems to be a myth. The interval for me is more like 10-11 days before performance degrades to a point I find intolerable. That's probably about twice as long as I used to go on average in OS 9, so there is progress.
Charles From Patrick Taw Hi Charles, I read your review of PDF Viewer and I like that it can use the scroll wheel to move thru a large PDF. I tried to make it my default viewer, previously was Netscape using the PDF plugin, but OS X won't accept it in the get info dialogue. Is there a way to do this? Thanks.
Sincerely,
Hi Patrick;
You're right. I got one document to accept PDF Viewer as its default opening application, but struch out applying a global change.
You coulkd add PDF Viewer to the list of Login Items in the Preferences so at least it will be started up whin you need it.
Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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