Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

26 Mar 2001

Mac OS X: Core Technologies Overview -1

Continued from:

In this series will be be detailing Mac OS X from a "system overview" perspective. Many readers have never had the chance to fully delve into Mac OS X's technical background beyond the material posted at Apple.com.

Application Services and Extensibility

Application Services is a new ability in Mac OS. For Newton users it is similar to the "soups technology" which essentially enables applications to share abilities with other apps. It is also similar in spirit to OpenDoc.

Mac OS X includes a new Services menu under the menu named for the currently running application. (see below).

Once a service is made available by an application any Mac OS X application interested in that service can take advantage of it. How it works is simple. Say you select a piece of text or image in an application, you then select a command from an application listed in the Services menu and that command is executed on the selection, invoking the second application that is offering "services" to other applications.

In the example above I selected a piece of text that happens to be an email address. It happens to be from an email document but it could easily be from a FileMaker database or Excel spreadsheet. Selecting it and choosing Services > Mail > Mail To takes the selection, opens the Mail application and begins a new email with this address in the To field. Pretty cool!

Even better these Services are linked to AppleScript enabling users to write scripts that link together the services of many applications.

Plug-Ins

Plug-ins are also ways in which developers and users can extend the capabilities of Mac OS X applications. OS X supports plugins with a new generalized architecture which provides advanced functionality. For example, the host application does not need to be aware of the implementation details of plugins. And users can launch plugins while the application is already running.

The link will work below as soon as Overview-2 is complete.

Next: Overview - 2