Application services have undergone significant changes in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. View the release notes for detailed information on how these changes impact Bellhop services.
Version 2.0.5 will be the final release of Bellhop since much of its functionality can now be replaced by Automator services.
Say hello to Bellhop, an easy way to write Mac OS X system services. Have an idea for a service, but don't want to fire up Xcode? No problem! Just write your service in one of the supported scripting languages and let Bellhop do the heavy lifting.
How does Bellhop work?
Bellhop uses a single-window interface that allows you to organize, edit and configure your services in one place. Publishing a new service is simply a matter of writing the script for your service and configuring some settings.
Behind the scenes, Bellhop updates the necessary system property lists, updates the system-wide Services menu, and automatically activates your script when necessary.
Can Bellhop handle more than just text?
Absolutely! Although most services are designed to operate on simple text, you are not limited to text based services. For example, you can write services that take tab-delimited data to produce custom graphs. You can operate on selected files in the Finder. You can manipulate image data. Essentially any type of data that can be manipulated on the pasteboard can be manipulated in Bellhop. These are some of the pasteboard data types that Mac OS X supports:
- string data
- filenames
- html content
- pdf content
- rtf content
- image data
- urls
- color data
- font data
- vcard data
Is Bellhop multilingual?
Bellhop is built from the ground-up to support multiple languages. Out of the box, Bellhop supports the following popular scripting languages:
- AppleScript
- F-Script
- Perl
- Python
- Ruby
If you don't see your favorite scripting language in the list, you can always use the Bellhop SDK to write your own language plug-ins. Be sure to check back for the SDK's availability.
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