Those optimistic about 2013 point to the second half of the year (now only four months away) as when we’ll begin to see some stronger growth. In their view, Europe will be better, the U.S. will be stronger, China will begin to reaccelerate in earnest, currency will be stable, and (perhaps most importantly) the year-over-year (YoY) comparisons between 2012 and 2013 will be easier because mid-2012 was so weak. Moreover, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci stated during the company’s recent earnings call, “You can’t starve IT for too long,” which suggests that better times must get rolling again. On the other hand, CEO John Chambers’ statement in the Cisco earnings call, that perhaps 2012 represents the new normal, might be a better indicator of what we can expect in 2013. We’ll see.

That said, here’s what we’re expecting for 2013.

Table 1. 2012 and 2013 worldwide IT spending (in $ billions)

Overall, smartphones and tablets will lead the way, with a 5.6 percent worldwide IT growth rate in 2013. While Apple’s tepid forward guidance in its recent earnings call and its implications for smartphones and tablets gives us pause, we expect the category to continue to lead, with growth in the 20.4 percent range in 2013. In hardware, 2013 will look like 2012, with smartphones and tablets buoying the otherwise-weak spending in the PC, peripheral, and server segments. (This will be offset somewhat by stronger storage and network hardware spending.) Software continues to flourish — especially solutions-related software like SaaS-enabled customer-relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management (SCM), and industry vertical systems like health care. This sector will continue to grow in 2013. Finally, services has experienced a punishing 2012, and this area will only look modestly better in 2013.

A methodological note: We’ve reevaluated our model and determined that we have underweighted business-process outsourcing (BPO) as a service category. As such, we are restating 2012 and 2013 growth rates to accommodate a higher weighting of BPO in our services spending. The net is that growth in services and all spending are a bit more robust, since BPO is growing faster than the aggregate of traditional IT services. The full methodology can be found at the end of this report.

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• IT spending update, third quarter 2012
• IT spending update, fourth quarter 2012
• Work media tools in 2012 and beyond

Talking about “the cloud” is a pretty popular thing to do, at least in technology circles. We have a whole stream within GigaOM devoted to cloud-related topics, and everyone from Google to Microsoft — and of course Amazon, which more or less pioneered the cloud — is selling cloud-based platforms. Apple even launched something called iCloud as part of its latest update. But will we always talk this way? If history is any guide, eventually the idea of the cloud as something separate from the web will disappear as more people get used to the concept — although when that day will come is anyone’s guess.

The arrival of the cloud as a mainstream phenomenon is one of the topics we’re going to be talking about at the upcoming Net:Work conference, which GigaOM is presenting at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on Dec. 8. Among others, we’ll be talking to and hearing from people like Box.net founder and CEO Aaron Levie, Tim Young of Socialcast, and senior executives from companies like Jive Software, Rypple and Elance. Many of these companies are leaders when it comes to changing the way that we work, including the use of cloud services.

Do we really need to know there’s a cloud?

Box.net and similar companies such as Dropbox use the cloud for file hosting and syncing, so you never have to remember which computer you left a specific file on, or use cumbersome remote-access apps to get to the document you need. They have become such an integral part of the way many people work (including me) it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. And in many ways the fact that they use “the cloud” is irrelevant — all that users really need to know is that their files are available whenever and wherever they want them.

If I was explaining either service to my parents, for example, I would try not to use the term “cloud” at all. It wouldn’t really make any sense to them without an explanation, and once I started explaining it — how the cloud is a bunch of servers that Amazon or Google maintains in giant buildings that hold billions of individual files — it would actually make things worse. If I just pointed out that any files placed in a specific folder would automatically show up in other folders on different computers, then they would understand everything they need to know.

Of course, this kind of feature would probably seem like magic to my parents — but then, much of modern technology falls into that category for them, I think. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Geeks and technology fans used to like to talk about their computers and what processors they had, and how much RAM, and even what kind of cooling system they had in them — as well as which operating system was better. As computers have become more powerful and ubiquitous, with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets taking over a large share of the market, I seem to hear fewer of those conversations. And because so much of what we do now involves the web and the “cloud,” things like operating systems and processors and specific PC features are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The cloud is like the atmosphere — all around us

In the same way, I think the whole idea of a “cloud” will eventually cease to be remarkable — just as computing power is gradually disappearing into the environment around us and becoming part of everyday objects like mirrors or jewellery, even as computers become more powerful every day. Already, hundreds of millions of people use cloud services without even realizing it or talking about it as the cloud. Web-based email is the norm now rather than the exception, and services like Facebook have hundreds of millions of users who likely never stop to think about where their content is being hosted.

That’s not to say there aren’t important issues involved in the cloud, including what rights your cloud provider has to simply delete data (as Amazon did last year with the files hosted by WikiLeaks) or what legal liabilities you undertake when you host your files, photos and other data on a U.S.-based server — something that companies based in other jurisdictions need to be aware of. And in many cases, users themselves need to be aware that their files or content can easily disappear, making backups a necessity.

But in the not-too-distant future, we will all be living and working and exchanging files and services via the cloud, to the point where it won’t really even make sense to talk about the cloud as something separate. It will be like the atmosphere: all around us, invisible, and only important when we don’t have access to it. For more on how the cloud and other technologies are changing the way we live and work, join me at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference on Dec. 8.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Satoru Kikuchi and Argonne National Laboratory

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Tero Ojanperä, who has been with Nokia for 21 years, is leaving the company and is going to be working for a new investment fund, Vision+, that will fund apps and services for the Nokia and Windows Mobile 7 platforms. The fund is going to be backed by Nokia, which is an anchor investor in the fund. Ojanperä will be a managing partner.

Ojanperä’s exit is yet another sign that the new Nokia, which some have criticized as a battleship going around in circles, is breaking links with the past. For the past six months I have been hearing that Ojanperä was being eased out. It seems that instead of Nokia’s giving him the old heave-ho, he and the company found a mutually compatible exit strategy.

And why not? Ojanperä has been a good soldier for the company and has done whatever was asked of him. He was a champion of Nokia’s mapping efforts and during many conversations, we discussed how location could be the key to the mobile experience. Ojanperä, who was Nokia’s EVP of services, was a big champion of the Ovi store and helped make that a reality. He was previously chief technology officer, chief strategy officer and head of research for the Finnish company.

When he was speaking at our Mobilize 2010 conference, I gave Ojanperä some lip, but he was very graceful. Ojanperä was a good ambassador for Nokia, especially during troubled times, because he didn’t wear blinders — though I would argue that like many of his peers at Nokia, he stayed in denial of Apple’s iPhone for way too long. I am going to miss talking to him and discussing the future of Nokia and mobile. Or perhaps he will be more candid in his new role as a managing partner at this new fund.

From a broader perspective, I see this exit as yet another negative for Nokia. Ojanperä’s exit takes away some of the institutional knowledge of the Symbian platform, which is still an important component of the company’s revenue stream. Ojanperä’s exit raises doubts about the NAVTEQ mapping platform too.

So far, Stephen Elop hasn’t really set the world on fire since coming over from Microsoft. Nokia’s sales are imploding, and by the time the company get its new Windows Mobile 7–based phones to the market, it might be too late.

P.S.: Join us at Mobilize 2011, our mobile Internet conference scheduled for Sept. 26 and 27 in San Francisco.

Tero Ojanperä speaking at Mobilize 2010

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First of all, you’ll need to open up Automator (Applications > Automator) and create a new Service by double-clicking the Service icon. If you don’t see this option when Automator starts, go to File > New and the new workflow screen will show.

At the top of the right-hand panel, there are two drop-down lists. Change the first to say URLs and leave the second on Any Application. Leave the Replaces selected text box unchecked.

Now, in the left-hand column, under the Utilities category, find Run Applescript and drag it over into the workflow on the right.

In the right-hand panel, replace the placeholder text in the Run Applescript action by copying and pasting the following script:


on run {input}
set inputResult to (input as string)
ignoring case

if (((characters 1 thru 4 of inputResult) as string) is not equal to "http") then
display dialog "Invalid URL"

else
set curlCMD to "curl --stderr /dev/null \"http://bit.ly/api?url=" & input & "\""
set tinyURL to (do shell script curlCMD)
return tinyURL

end if
end ignoring
end run

Next thing to do is add a Copy to Clipboard action from the Utilities category underneath the Applescript action. This grabs the output from the script and copies it to the clipboard ready for you to paste wherever you want.

Finally, you need to save your Service so that you can access it in other applications. Call it something sensible like “Shorten URL” or “Send to bit.ly” so that it’s obvious what goes on when you run it.

Once you’ve saved it, you can test it out by selecting a URL, right- or control-clicking and choosing the name of your service (in my case, it was “Shorten URL”).

Once you’ve activated the Service, wait a couple of seconds while the script contacts the bit.ly API, then paste into your browser. You’ll see that a bit.ly URL has been created, and if you follow it, you’ll be taken to the original page whose URL you originally selected.

If right-clicking isn’t your thing, and you prefer using the keyboard, you can go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services and set up a keyboard shortcut. Now when you have text selected, just use that keyboard shortcut and you’ll get your short URL.

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I realize you can open a PDF, drag another PDF into the Preview window, and combine in that fashion, but in my experience, there’ve been issues with cross-platform compatibility when using this method. I turned to Automator, and within a few minutes, had a pretty simple and effective way to solve the problem.

1. I decided to create a Service rather than a standalone application or workflow, so it would be accessible from anywhere I may end up in the Finder, at any time.



2. Since PDFs were my focus, I set the service to target them while browsing from the Finder. You can obviously play around with these settings to do different things, depending on your needs.



3. The first action to drag into the editor is the heavy lifter here, and is very clearly named: “Combine PDF Pages.” I’d prefer they append to one another rather than shuffle them together.



4. At this point, I thought I was done, but when I would run the Service against a couple of PDF files, I had no idea where the resulting file ended up. For some reason, it wasn’t in the clipboard, but rather, was in some non-accessible directory of OS X. So added the “Move Finder Items” command into the editor, and the result was just what I wanted.



5. Finally, select the files in the Finder, right click, and choose your newly-created Service from the Services submenu. The resulting PDF shows up as some gibberish file name, right on the desktop.

Automator is a flexible tool, and can be made to do so many of the random tasks that we find need for on a daily basis. Hopefully, this simple solution will kickstart the process of creating your own custom workflows, as well.

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Opportunity cost: the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action (Investopedia)

The easiest way to think about opportunity cost is with time. Choose to spend an hour one way, and you miss out on all the other ways you could have spent that hour. It’s a great way to think about productivity, but have you ever thought about opportunity cost as it relates to the products and services you offer within your business?

It takes a certain amount of resources (time, money, effort, etc.) to pursue a given product or service, and since you only have so much to give in the way of resources, it’s important to choose the ones that are most likely to guarantee success for your business. Choose one, and you limit the resources available to pursue another.

Usually, we’re inclined to go with the options we think will generate the most money, but you have to dig a lot deeper to discover the true opportunity cost associated with a given product or service. Here are just a few of the things to consider.

1. Money. With certain products and services, you can demand much higher fees, but often there’s a trade-off of time or cost to you as well.
2. Creation/performance time. With every product and service, there’s a set amount of time required of you to actually create it or perform it. Some are more automated, once you put in the initial creation time; some are group-centric, allowing you to leverage your time; others limit you to working with one client at a time.
3. Lead generation time. Some products and services, especially big-ticket items, have longer sales cycles, while others require you to generate higher quantities of traffic in order to reach certain sales levels, so it’s important to consider the amount of time and energy required of you to generate customers or clients to purchase the product or service. It might also be important for you to start generating income quickly, and certain products and services can take much longer to generate profit than others.
4. Emotional labor involved. It’s not something we usually think about, but every product and service requires a certain amount of emotional labor. Writing a book, for instance, might require a lot more emotional labor from you than meeting with a client for a consulting call. You have to consider how important emotional labor is to you, and if it’s realistic to expect yourself to do emotionally demanding work for long periods of time.
5. Long-term stability and sustainability. Some considerations will be more indirect or intangible, like long-term stability and sustainability. For instance, you might prefer doing more work up front, if it ensures greater flexibility and freedom later, or you might want to know that you don’t have to work at an intense pace for too long.
6. Growth potential and saleability. Some products and services might limit your growth potential or your ability to sell your business down the road, especially if they require your direct input.

To give an example, let’s take a virtual assistance business, where there are tons of possibilities for potential service and product offerings. As a virtual assistant, you would need to narrow down the list of possibilities to maybe three or four services or products that you thought would be the most successful.

Say you narrowed down the possibilities to individual client services and some kind of how-to guide to sell on your website. Let’s assume you wanted to generate $5,000 per month in revenue for your business. Here’s how the numbers would work out for each option:

Option 1: Individual Client Services

• Hourly Rate for Services: $45
• Average Client Usage: 10 Hours Per Month
• Ongoing Clients Needed: 12
• Time Required to Fulfill: 120 Hours Per Month (Roughly 28 Hours Per Week)
• Monthly Revenue Generated: $5,400

Option 2: Selling a How-To Guide

• Price for How-To Guide: $30
• Sales Required Per Month: 167
• Time Required to Fulfill: Product-Creation Time
• Monthly Revenue Generated: $5,010

Financially speaking, it’s easy to see what you could make with each option, but here are some other considerations. Think about the individual client services to start.

• How long and how much effort would it take you to generate 12 ongoing clients?
• What about locking yourself in to one-on-one client work? Wouldn’t that affect the overall opportunity cost of that option? Yes, but what if you hired a couple of virtual assistants to work on your team? Say you paid them $25 per hour. Now you would need 25 ongoing clients, but you would still make the same amount of money each month, and 100 percent of the work would be delegated to your team. How long and how much effort would it take you to generate 25 ongoing clients? Could you maintain that level if you could devote 100 percent of your time at that point to that task? How hard would it be to sustain that level going forward?

Now think about the how-to guide:

• How long and how much effort would it take you to get to the level where you could generate 167 monthly sales?
• How much effort would it take to maintain sales of 167 per month over the long term?
• What about surviving while you gain momentum and get up to that number of sales? If you had at least a few clients with the service option, you’d make over $1,000, but if you only sold a few copies of your how-to guide, you’d make less than $100 for the month.

There are a lot of things to think about when it comes to the opportunity cost of a given product or service, and in many ways, the decision will be unique to a given business, individual, and situation, but it’s important to carefully evaluate the products and services you are pursuing in your business and not base the decision solely on the money that the opportunity might create. As you weigh the opportunity cost of a given possibility in your business, ask yourself, “What am I giving up in order to do this, and would it be better to spend my resources on something else?”

How did you decide what products and services to offer in your business, and did you consider the opportunity cost?

Photo by Flickr user AZRI_fi, licensed under CC 2.0

24 hours later it was still misbehaving, but by that time I’d finally snapped and decided to look into it. A call to O2 resulted in a recorded message that was played before the usual welcome message; “We are experiencing some difficulties,” an overly sympathetic voice cooed, “We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this might have caused.” (I’m paraphrasing, of course).

I didn’t stop there — I asked the mighty Google for more information, and it turns out those ‘difficulties’ affected quite a number of O2′s customers, both iPhone and otherwise, judging by the 20-odd page discussion that was raging on O2′s official support pages.

Tech news site V3.co.uk published several notices from O2 during the outages, which began rather hopefully:

We’re sorry that some mobile customers have had problems with data today – these services will be back up tonight.

…but ended on a decidedly more sullen note;

The system fault has been fixed and internet connections are gradually being restored. MMS and Visual Voicemail remain affected. We’re working on these as a priority.

Thankfully the problem was cleared up reasonably swiftly. Something to do with incorrectly assigned IP addresses, or leaves on the line (trust me, if you’re British that’s hilarious!)

While some tech sites are reporting on the data outages in London in much the same tone they would AT&T’s lackluster services in New York or San Francisco, I must offer my own (admittedly anecdotal) evidence to the contrary; my partner and I are both iPhone-toting, data-hungry technophiles who just happen to live in London. And this is the first time this year we’ve experienced any truly memorable disruption to O2′s data network. For clarity: I’m not saying we haven’t suffered the occasional dropped-call here and there. We have — at a rate of perhaps one dropped call every other month. You see, when all is said and done, the O2 network is normally exemplary (as it should be, considering how much we pay them).

Still, O2 has been reaching out to its customers, cap in hand, doing that quintessentially British thing…apologizing. In a Reuters report published today O2′s Chief Executive Ronan Dunne is quoted saying:

Where we haven’t met our own high standards then there’s no question, we apologize to customers for that fact. But it would be wrong to say O2 has failed its customers en masse.

The story is much the same here in the UK for O2 as it is for AT&T in the States; smartphone ownership is on the rise and smartphone owners use a lot of data, relative to the amount consumed by so-called ‘feature phone’ customers. The network carriers simply aren’t prepared for this. Historically they’ve never had to provide this much bandwidth and their business models (typically structured into five year plans that don’t change much in-between revisions) simply don’t make adequate (if any) provisions for the scale of network investment and improvement that data-hungry devices like the iPhone demand.

Still, that doesn’t stop their execs bragging about the upgrades that have taken place. From Reuters;

The company [O2] had invested 30 million pounds ($48 million) in its London network to meet demand [...] and 200 extra mobile base stations had been installed.

Sounds impressive, no? But I wonder… that’s an awful lot of money, and an awful lot of new base stations. That sort of massive investment into network expansion was likely planned years ago as part of the company’s long-term growth strategy. Indeed, such a huge investment plan could easily have predated the 2007 introduction of the iPhone, and the subsequent explosion in smartphone adoption.

However, I’m not beating up on O2. It might be feeling the same pain AT&T has so publically suffered in recent months, but at least it’s not reacting the same way AT&T’s CEO Ralph De La Vega did, with barely-concealed threats of data-caps and tiered pricing plans for smartphone users.

AT&T’s message (at least how it comes across to me) has mostly been along the lines of, “You iPhone customers are a nuisance, you’re to blame for all our network problems, so you’ll have to pay us more money!” Conversely, O2′s message reads, “You iPhone customers chew through a terribly high volume of data that sometimes causes us problems – we’re sorry we weren’t ready for that, and we’re working on it”

Color me biased. But tell me you don’t think AT&T could learn something about good PR from their British counterparts.

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Let’s break down the features of MobileMe see if it’s worth it. The retail price of MobileMe is $99, though discounts abound, but for this article, let’s stick with the $99 price. My calculator app says this comes to $8.25 a month, or a little more than a quarter a day. Pretty cheap, but can you cut it out and save some money? What if Apple sold the features a la carte, like we wish our cable companies would do with channels? With a bit of research, here are what I think are the market rates for each of these features (or at least what I would pay for them).

Ring my iPhone/Display a message (Free)

The ability to force your phone to ring, even when it’s in vibrate mode is nice. However, we all got along OK before that feature was implemented. It’s nice, but I wouldn’t pay for it.

Remote Lock and Remote Wipe ($4.99 per month)

We all know Liz Lemon’s ordeal with her iPhone. While I don’t have adult photos on my iPhone, I do have information I’d rather not fall into the wrong hands. Being able to remotely lock and then possibly wipe my iPhone is really of great value to me. It’s peace of mind insurance and I’ll price it like AT&T’s insurance for other phones. Those who are not as concerned with having their phone fall into others’ hands may not value this as much as I do.

Find my Phone on the Map ($5.00 or combine with Remote Lock/Wipe for $7.50)

AT&T has a GPS service for other phones called “AT&T Family Map” and charges $9.99 to track up to two people. Since this is for just one phone, I divided the cost in half. Being able to find your phone when you lose it is awesome. I value this feature the same as the Remote Lock and Wipe: peace of mind if the phone gets lost. One without the other would be helpful and have pretty much the same value. Combine the two and I expect a bit of a discount.

iDisk (Free for 2 GB, .25 for each additional GB)

Yawn. 20 GB of storage in the cloud. Who doesn’t store data in the cloud these days? Standard pricing seems to be to give two GB away for free and charge about 25 cents for each additional GB (See DropBox or SugarSync). Given the fact that the iDisk tends to be rather slow, I’m not sure I’d want to pay much at all. The “seamless” desktop synchronization of the iDisk can’t match the true automatic synchronization of DropBox and SugarSync

Back To My Mac (Free)

Being able to remotely get files off your Mac? There’s an app for that and it was first developed in late 1980s and was named Timbuktu. In addition to Timbuktu (which still exists), these days there are free products such as LogMeIn Free and VNC (See my review of iPhone remote apps). Additionally, Back To My Mac isn’t 100% reliable, and if you can better rely on other free products, then how much is it really worth?

MobileMe Gallery (Free)

Online photo gallery? Who doesn’t have one these days? Flickr and Facebook fit the bill nicely and if you don’t like those social networking sites pretty much anyone who develops film today will give you a free online gallery, with occasional minor restrictions.

Me.com Email (Free)

Would anyone actually pay for web-based email? Really? With offerings from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, someone has to be really out of the loop to be paying for web based email. Granted, Me.com makes it pretty and easy, but it’s more a matter of personal preference than any true value. Sending large files and sharing them are easy, but countless services exist to help with just that. The average user rarely needs to send a large file that one of these services doesn’t support.

iWeb Publishing (Free)

For those of us who use iWeb, MobileMe makes publishing delightfully simple. You can publish to other sites with a bit of a workaround, and those workarounds are easy to find on the web, so paying for this feature is for people who don’t know how to Google.

Over the Air Syncing ($2.00)

The value of this is based on Verizon’s Backup Assistant program that will back up your contacts for almost any Verizon phone. When we look at the T-Mobile Sidekick it’s included with the service. For syncing files between computers, see Dropbox and SugarSync. Contacts and calendars can be synced using Google as a conduit (See BusySync). Having your keychains and widgets synced is nice, but workarounds with other syncing software allow you to do that as well.

Personally, this is the killer feature of MobileMe for me. I work with a large number of clients and all my contacts and appointments are on my iPhone. Before I can get to a desktop to sync, I’ll often have made a few appointments and might accidentally double book myself if I didn’t have this feature. Sure, I could use Google to do it exclusively but that’s a few extra steps and time is often of the essence for me.

All of it working together as one package (Free or Priceless)

Seamless integration is nice, don’t get me wrong. Would I be willing to pay for it? Not really. I’d rather save money buying the features I need and make them work together myself, manually. For some people, the very reason they bought an iPhone instead of another mobile device is due to the ease of use factor, so for these folks, the more everything works together without thinking about it, the better.

So what’s my personal decision? When I add the Remote wipe/lock/find/ring feature ($7.50) with the Over the Air Syncing ($2.00), MobileMe justifies itself. Other features really aren’t worth paying for. So again, how much would you pay and what features are most valuable for you? Operators are standing by.

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I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB.

One snag though has been that services created through the new Automator template included in Snow Leopard leave out some vital bits that limit integration. Luckily, a handy application from Waffle Software called ThisService makes creating proper services that integrate seamlessly with QSB a lot easier than you might think.

Being able to extend the functionality of QSB with OS X services really opens up a lot of possibilities. Grab text or files in QSB and pass them on to your services to do whatever you want with them, like creating a new To Do item in iCal. I’ve been focused recently on replicating functionality that I lost when I made the switch over from Quicksilver and I think that this improved service integration will get me about 90 percent of the way there.

The bad news is that this means I need to whip up a bunch of custom services for myself. The good news is that ThisService makes that task very easy. Just give it a script (AppleScript will do, but if you’re more comfortable with other scripting languages you can use those), define the type and name of your service and click Create Service. ThisService handles all the fiddly Cocoa bits and spits out a completed service into your ~/Library/Services directory where QSB will see it and serve it up as an available action when appropriate.

Actually writing your AppleScript will likely be the most complicated part, which is why ThisServices comes bundled with some handy starter scripts to put you on the right path. They also make a number of example scripts and services available for download from their site. The scripts don’t need to be complicated. For example, here is the one I use for adding To Do items in iCal:

on process(input)
tell application "iCal"
tell calendar "work"
make new todo at end with properties {summary:input}
end tell
end tell
end process

If you wanted to get fancy you could pass additional properties like the due date, priority, etc., but just getting a new item into the list is all I need.

Once you have your service setup accessing them through Quick Search Box is as easy as can be. Because showing seems to be more useful than describing, below is a quick little video clip of the To Do service in action. What kind of services would you like to have? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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It realizes it by allowing you to create your own Services. Unless you really needed to delve into the Services menu (located under the Application menu) you’re likely to never even know it’s there — when I asked a friend to screenshot her Leopard Services menu for this article, she replied “what menu?” That menu was, to put it gently, a bleeping mess. Every service showed up, even ones that couldn’t be used with program or you had little or no use for. Here’s what it looks like in Leopard.

In Snow Leopard, the Services menu now only displays actions that can be handled by that program. You can also choose what services show up, so if there’s one you never use, you can hide it. Services are also contextual and will show up when you right-click on an actionable item like text in Pages or a file in Finder. If you click on a file in the Finder, and then the gear icon in the toolbar, you can also see what actions apply to that file.

In Leopard, I could create a Finder or iCal action, but creating workflows that would work in any application wasn’t very user friendly. You might be able to create an AppleScript, or if you’re a Quicksilver junkie you could create an action for it, but Snow Leopard really lets the average user create tools to enhance productivity. Now that Automator can create Services, it’s really becoming a powerful tool. Also, in Snow Leopard, Automator can now use data detectors, so if you select an address, you can use Automator to write an action that’ll look it up in Google Maps.

I’m going to show you a few services I created today while learning the new tools — as well as a few I got from macosxautomation.com. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t do these in 10.5, but how slick and easy it now is in 10.6 is amazing. I can easily see the Services menu now acting as a sort of Macro Central to it make it easy to find my actions.

Emailing Specific Files to Specific People

I’m in a weekly D&D group and we use Wizard’s Character Builder to manage our characters (sadly, it’s Windows-only, ensuring I’ll be a Parallels customer for the foreseeable future). Kelsey, our GM, wants a copy and I’ll send a copy to the guy that hosts the game in case I forget to print them out. I created the service in the screenshot below to automatically attach my characters to a mail message and send them off. Now, regardless of what program I’m in, I can just choose the service I created and email them. I’ve got a few services like this created to email files to frequent recipients.

Lookup Text On Wikipedia

If you’re typing away and you want to look up text on Wikipedia, download the Internet Services action from macosxautomation.com. This will bring up a pop-up window that’ll let you quickly search Wikipedia. In what’s likely an “I’m missing something obvious moment,” I can’t seem to get the action to work from within Safari. While we’re on the subject of Safari, that same Internet Services action lets you create a webpage popup of any page. By default, it presents itself as an iPhone, so you get a small, mobile optimized pop up. This is handy if there’s any web sites you frequently consult.

Browse Your iPhoto Library

This is another one I downloaded from macosxautomation.com. One of the features I love in iWork is being able to browse my iPhoto library and insert a photo into my document. Now, with the Browse Library service, I can have that same functionality in any program.

Weird Glitches and Problems

So far in my admittedly small data sample, I’ve only run into a few issues. I’ve already talked about the Wiki lookup not working in Safari, but I’ve also noticed Automator doesn’t see text selected in Microsoft Word 2008 as “selected text” — no services other than the general services show up in Word (I didn’t try out the rest of the suite). What’s interesting is there are a ton of Office-related actions included in Automator. I’ve had an e-mail discussion with Microsoft’s Mac BU about this and they’re looking into it.

Resources

MacBreak Video has a great session with Sal Saghoian, the AppleScript Product Manager at Apple. I’m constantly amazed at how Sal’s laid-back presentation style actually makes what could be a dry topic easy to follow. He’ll show you some great video examples of what the new Automator can do.

I’ve mentioned macosxautomation.com multiple times, and I’m mentioning it again. This site is promising to be my one-stop shop as I continue to learn about Automator.

The changes in Automator look fantastic. Until now, my Automator usage has been very situational. In Snow Leopard, I’m looking forward to creating workflows I’ll be using daily.

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