Snow Leopard, the latest addition to the OS X family, has a new and very powerful feature called services.
hasn't mac (or at least os x) always had services? right now in leopard my firefox has a services menu with a whole bunch of different text-processing functions. i've never used services but i always assumed they were integral to mac os.
The services menu is an old NeXTstep feature that was half-heartedly carried over to MacOS X. (One aspect that was not carried forward: the services menu in NeXTstep appeared in the contextual menu that would pop up when right-clicking on something...no digging around through nested submenus.) In Snow Leopard, they revamped things so that only the relevant services show in a given context, and I think they gave the ability to assign keybindings to them, and put the back in the contextual menu where they belong.
Yeah, the author is mistaken. Services haven't just always been in OS X, they were even in Nextstep. Main difference in Snow Leopard is that they're also in a right-click menu now, instead of in the menu bar at the top.
Services only started appearing in OS X, it didn't exist in any version of Mac OS before then. The difference this time is that Snow Leopard gives you much more control over the Services menu, allowing you to select which ones should be active. This, together with the tighter integration with Automator, makes it very easy to create seamless workflows, either by selecting from the Services menu, using a right-click (contextual menu) or even a keyboard shortcut.
hasn't mac (or at least os x) always had services? right now in leopard my firefox has a services menu with a whole bunch of different text-processing functions. i've never used services but i always assumed they were integral to mac os.