Emulation
From the point of view of software, the Services menu is a means of inter-process communication. To the user, it is an interface for executing actions on selected data. The emulation of the Services menu is based on the fact that there are several ways this can be achieved in an operating system. Even in Mac OS X, there is an alternative system called the context menu handler, which is carried over from classic Mac OS.
In the X Window System, any data selected in an application is available to all other programs. Thus the Services menu can be an application which retrieves the current selection, and lets the user choose an action. Missing is the part about returning the processed data back to the originating application. Instead, the service can open a new window to show the results.
Alternatively, the service could replace the current cut buffer with the results of the operation, leaving the user only to perform a paste (since different toolkits implement copy/select and paste commands differently, and probably not under external program control).
Read more about this topic: Services Menu
Famous quotes containing the word emulation:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)