![]() ![]() It’s not as intuitive as the “Instant Send” approach, but it can still be all done with the keyboard. As with “Instant Send,” this automatically opens a new window in Safari with the result of the search for this term in the TERMIUM database When I encounter a term that I want to look up in TERMIUM in a Word document, I can just select it, press command-C to copy it to the Clipboard, then press the regular LaunchBar shortcut to invoke the LaunchBar menu, select the TERMIUM search template in that menu, press the Space bar to activate the template, then press command-V to paste the copied term and press Return. It involves using the Clipboard instead of LaunchBar’s “Instant Send” feature. The good news is that there is a slightly different approach that is not much more complicated and is actually supported in all Mac OS X applications, whether they support Mac OS X’s Services or not. It’ll give me yet another reason to try and use Pages as much as possible, of course, but there will always be situations where I have to use Word, and in those situations I will be forced to use a different approach. Maybe not in the first Mac OS X version of their product, but, you know, eventually.Īnyway, the bottom-line is that I cannot use LaunchBar’s “Instant Send” in Word, which is one of the applications that I use most frequently in my work. If Microsoft’s MacBU developers really “loved” the Mac as they regular say that they do, you’d think that they would make more of an effort to show their love by also embracing some of these less flashy, yet interesting and occasionally useful features in Mac OS X, such as the Services architecture. It should be up to the user to decide whether he wants to use the feature or not. I realize that Mac OS X’s Services has not exactly been a runaway success and is probably not used by the majority of Mac OS X users out there, but it is still frustrating that Microsoft and Adobe developers apparently do not really feel that they have to make any effort to support this feature. Microsoft and Adobe are the two major Mac software developers that constantly refuse to embrace or even support some core Mac OS X features. It’s nothing too surprising, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. The other text editors and word processors that I use in my daily work all support it, but not Microsoft Word. So the feature doesn’t work with Microsoft Word. See, what the LaunchBar documentation doesn’t indicate very clearly is that this “Instant Send” feature actually uses Mac OS X’s Services architecture.Īnd as we all know too well, after all these years, Microsoft’s applications still do not support Mac OS X’s Services architecture. ![]() Since I couldn’t find any mention of this anywhere, I contacted the ObDev tech support and their reply gave me the explanation. ![]() I first thought that maybe there was something problematic with the particular shortcut that I use for invoking LaunchBar ( command-Escape), so I switched to another shortcut in LaunchBar’s preferences, but I still got the same result. When you are in a Word document and you select a term and try to “instant send” it to LaunchBar by pressing and holding the LaunchBar shortcut, instead of sending the text to LaunchBar, Word actually… replaces the selected text by a manual page break. The bad news is that, of course, there had to be one application that would ruin the whole thing, and that application is-of course-Microsoft Word. (I don’t need to first switch to Safari, load the TERMIUM search form and then submit the term.) It’s great, because I can do it all with the keyboard, and it’s user-centric as opposed to application-centric, which is more intuitive. ![]() This automatically opens a new window in Safari with the result of the search for this term in the TERMIUM database. In other words, when I encounter a term that I need to look up in a text document, I can just select it, press and hold the LaunchBar shortcut, then select my TERMIUM search template in LaunchBar and press Return. The good news was that the new interface now allowed me to use LaunchBar to “instant send” a string of text from my current application (text editor, word processor) to TERMIUM in order to look it up in the database. The other day, I wrote about the recent revamp of TERMIUM, one of the on-line terminology databases that I use most often in my work. ![]()
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