Would You Want a Services Menu on the iPhone [Video]?

Chris Clark from Release Candidate One makes the case for a Services Menu on the iPhone.

Copy and paste make things possible if you take the time to switch between apps, but the experience sucks, so developers add convenience features, web service integration, and custom URL schemes. Apple provides some great APIs for integrating with the system utilities, but they're slow moving. There's no standard MFTweetComposeViewController, and there probably never will be.

Clark envisions a future where every app with a text field could email, tweet, blog, print, transmute, translate or read. The same idea could be applied to images. Every app that displays an image should be able to save, rotate, crop, ftp, set as wallpaper, send to Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr, and more.


His solution for how this might work? A Services Menu.

On the Mac the Services Menu takes the current selection and sends it to another app to be worked on. He notes this is under utilized on the desktop where saving and opening in another application is easy.

Today developers must pick and choose which external features to support, and present a gargantuan list to sate their users' desires. It's inefficient and it's redundant. A system of Services would show only the integration features the user wants, because it can only advertise Services from the apps the user has installed. On the Mac, Services are a niche. On iPhone OS they'd be nothing short of a revolution.

Take a look at this demo video Clark made to illustrate his point.


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