Mac developer's freebie refresh frenzy

Stephen Withers
Friday, 12 November 2010 16:10

Business IT - Technology

DEVONtechnologies has updated its collection of freeware for the Mac to deliver extra features and to better integrate with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

The TextEdit text editor that is part of Mac OS X is more like Windows' WordPad than Notepad in that it has enough formatting capability for many routine word processing uses, and - unlike WordPad - it is able to take advantage of the Mac's system-wide spell checker.

One thing it doesn't include is word count, a tool that's essential for students and journalists (and, for all I know, various other occupations). But Mac OS X does have Services, a mechanism for making extra functionality to programs in a stable way.

DEVONtechnologies has just released updates of its freeware services and applications, including WordService which counts the number of words in a TextEdit selection, or in any other Cocoa application or Carbon app with Services support. This means it can be used to count words in a PDF document displayed in Preview, an email received in Outlook, or even a message in a Skype chat window.

WordService also offers a variety of text conversion and reformatting options including capitalisation, switching between straight and curly quotes, and reflowing line-broken text into paragraphs. It can also insert the date and time in long or short formats, and replace a path (eg ~/Desktop) with a list of the files and folders it contains.

(Hint: after installing WordService, open Services Preference, enable the individual services it provides that you wish to use, and disable those you don't.)

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