ACP Web Services It just got closer, DP.

'Awesome!'
 - MacUpdate

'The best got even better!'
 - MacUpdate

[Important update: the ACP Web Services have been deprecated in favour of the AWS Resources accessible for download from the AWS Resource Page. They're still free, and they're better than ever. Click here.]

Everyone knows what services are.

When you install a new app, something new pops up on your 'application' menu under 'Services'. They're 'services' - a Cocoa clipboard fantasy come true.

[ACP Service Manager Pro takes Cocoa services to an even higher level - click here.]

You highlight some text and Safari launches, opens a new window, and surfs to your URL. Apple Mail puts your text in the body of a message, or in the 'To:' field. Victoria reads your sonnet back to you. Whatever.

Go to the Services menu, choose something, up pops an app to do something for you.

In his Missing Manual for OS X David Pogue writes about how one can get a glimpse of the future of this uncharted technology.

'InstantLinks, a piece of $5 shareware from Subsume Technologies, offers a useful look ahead to the future of services. It adds to your Services menu commands that send your highlighted text to various services on the web.

'For example, you can choose Dictionary Lookup (looks up the selected text in an online dictionary), Map Location (looks up the selected address at MapQuest.com) - great when somebody emails you an invitation), Open URL, Search Web, and Thesaurus Lookup.'

That's $5 for five services. $1 each. The starting lineup for the ACP Web Services are 43 (forty three) services strong with over 200 (two hundred) more in the 'grab bag' and they're all for free. You can see some of them on the right.

You get ARIN Whois IP lookup, ping, traceroute, six (6) Google searches (including groups, news and images, yes), the Internet Movie Database, NetLingo, Dictionary and Thesaurus lookups, three ways of emailing a message, a simple 'surf to' service, and a visit with Wikipedia.

You get Amazon, Amazon UK, PriceGrabber, eBay, Epicurious Bon Appetit, Bartlett's Quotations, the British National Corpus, OneLook, six Dialectizer translators, six (6) Vivísimo searches, Teoma, five (5) Yahoo searches, and six (6) Dogpile searches.

And you get over two hundred (200) more - and that's just for starters. The World Wide Web is rich and ripe with search engines waiting to be plucked - by you.

And it gets better still: the ACP system is configurable, meaning you can not only edit what is already there, but you can add new services of your own - without altering a single line of code.

And you will never see the ACP Web Services on screen.

And there is no code injection, there are no administrator's passwords, there is no foul play. There is only clean, easy and configurable.

Download the first two hundred seventy (270) services here (45 KB) - you'll have another couple of dozen by bedtime.

The future just got closer, DP.

See Also
Introducing the ACP Service Browser

Screenshot
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