The Best Services or Widgets to Add to Your Mac
One of the most underrated features of the Mac is the services menu, which you can find by right-clicking on anything—say, selected text or any image. Hover over the Services section and you’ll see a ton of quick actions. You can find the same collection in the menu bar: simply click on the name of the application that is currently open and hover over Services .
There are all kinds of useful options here. For example, you can look up a word in the dictionary or add some text to your to-do list. You can open the URL using IINA, a great video player for Mac . You get the idea: you can automate whatever is selected. You can control which things show up and which don’t by opening System Preferences and going to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services . From here you can check or uncheck items. You can also set your own keyboard shortcuts for these services.
Where it gets really interesting is when you look into the special services you can download. Here are some of the best apps I could find that add cool features to the services menu on your Mac.
The dictator reads the text out loud to you
Mac has a built-in text reading service, but I don’t really like it. Dictator , in my experience, works much better. With this app you can highlight any text in any app and read it out loud. There’s a pop-up window with buttons for play and forward and backward, and an additional window you can open to see the text on screen as you read it. If you want, you can change the voice you use in System Preferences > Accessibility > Speech Content – I prefer to use one of Siri’s high-quality voices.
CalcService does math
CalcService is a free download that lets you perform math operations on any text field. Once you install the application, you can select any mathematical formula in any application, for example (62*7)/4 , and get the answer right on the spot, for example: (62*7)/4 = 108.5 . It’s magic, and it gets even better if you create a keyboard shortcut for this feature.
WordService
WordService is a free download from Devon Technologies, the same company that created CalcService. It offers all sorts of text manipulation tools, the most obviously useful of which allows you to count the number of words and characters for any text you select. This is useful for a variety of tasks: from writing posts on social networks to long texts. But there is much more interesting here. There are steps to convert uppercase text to lowercase and vice versa. There are actions to insert the current time or current date. There are also steps to add or remove smart quotes from a block of text. If you regularly publish anything online, this is a good collection of tools to have on hand.
SearchLink quickly searches for a link and adds it
SearchLink is a little more difficult to explain, but I like it. Essentially, you can highlight any text, run the service, and the tool will automatically search the web for that term and add a link in markdown format. Here, for example, is a text document with my name:
If I run SearchLink on the selected text, which is my name, the document will look like this:
The link was added without the need to open a browser. This can save you a lot of writing time if you are writing in markdown. And there are more advanced functions you can dig into, including a function that populates all the links in a document. This is a great tool to always have on hand.
Shortcuts can also work in the same way
Didn’t find the app you’re looking for? You can try to build it yourself. Any shortcut you create in Apple Shortcuts can function as a service. Just make sure that “Use as Quick Action Menu ” and “Services” are highlighted in the shortcut’s details panel. Check out our list of the most useful shortcuts on macOS if you need some ideas on how to implement this.