Services in the Contextual Menu

In Mac OS X the Services menu is hidden away up in the Application Menu - miles from the data it is working on. Since the Services are context-sensitive it seems natural that it should be available from the Contextual Menu (the one that appears when you right-click (or control-click)).

I always wondered why Apple hasn’t done this - I used to have a pet theory that someone high-up at Apple disliked it. Now I know the real reason:

This page explains it:

Eric Schlegel of Apple says:
“We’re aware of this issue and I agree it would be a useful thing to do. The tricky part is that the Carbon implementation of Services requires that a Carbon event be sent to an event target representing the object to which the service would be apply. When a contextual menu is opened, there is no event target passed to the Contextual Menu Manager to indicate the object to which the menu applies; therefore, the Services support in Carbon has no where to send its Carbon events.
I’ve got some ideas for new Contextual Menu Manager APIs that would take an event target so we could solve this in the future, but it will probably require application adoption.”

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