Bellhop Help

About Bellhop

Bellhop allows you to create scripted application services that are available to Carbon and Cocoa applications running under Mac OS X. The Bellhop application is used for both editing services as well as executing them. For a brief introduction to Services on Mac OS X, see the About Services section of this help guide.

You use Bellhop to create and edit services which are then executed by the Bellhop application. When you select a servce from the Services menu, Bellhop will automatically start if it is not already already running[1], and then execute the selected service's script. Multiple users can use Bellhop, however each user maintains her own set of services.

Services in Bellhop are written in one of the many supported scripting languages. Currently Bellhop supports Ruby, AppleScript, Perl, Python and F-Script. When you create a new service, you are prompted to choose its language, which is not editable after the service has been created. All services are grouped into collections which are displayed as submenus in the Services menu.

[1] Currently, if you invoke a service from within a Carbon application, the system does not automatically start Bellhop. If you deal mainly with Carbon apps, you can add Bellhop to the list of applications that start automatically at log-in. Cocoa apps are not affected.

Each time you launch Bellhop, the About window is displayed allowing you to visit the Bellhop website to make a donation if you'd like, however this is strictly optional; Bellhop will function without limitation regardless of whether or not you choose to donate.


About window

 

If you have donated and don't wish to see the About window anymore, you can check off the I've already donated checkbox.

Sample Documents

You can get started with some sample documents by heading over to the Bellhop Service Library, where you'll find pre-packaged services which you can import into your own services collections.