Tinnef Software has released the first beta version of Text Wielder, a text processing application that provides Custom Services on Mac OS X.
Text Wielder is a text processing application that can be used to create and provide custom services via the Mac OS X service menu, according to MacTech magazine. Services can be used to process text, generate and open URLs, generate and execute AppleScripts, display processed text in a dialog box or create new text files.
The Text Wielder service menu can be edited using the built-in Service Manager, which lets you add, rename and remove services from the service menu. Text Wielder comes with over 120 services and users can create their own using SFRL (Simple Find and Replace Language), a new technology made specifically for Text Wielder.
Some of the included services are: Search at Google.com, Search the Internet with Sherlock, Clean up an Email, Get a Map for a Zipcode or City, Track a Fedex/UPS/USPS Package on the Web, Lookup a Stock Quote, Execute a Unix command, Convert to Smart Quotes, Convert Line Endings (for Mac, Unix or Windows systems), Open a Path in the Finder, Generate an HTML Gradient and Word Translation (English to French and more).
Text Wielder allows users to create SFRL scripts that can be used either as services or directly in the built-in text editor. SFRL uses modified regular expression syntax to define text input and processes output using a JavaServer Page (JSP). This combination of regular expressions and JSPs makes SFRL an extremely powerful text processing language with access to the full Java API and Cocoa API (application programming interface), according to Eric Blenkush at Tinnef.