Activating the Snow Leopard Services in the Finder and other applications

Mac OS X 10.6 Leopard offers a new and cleaner way of adding functionality into the Finder.

This new mechanism is called a "System Service" and replaces the "Contextual Menu Plug-in" and "Hot Key" components used by A Better Finder Rename on older operating system versions.

In order for the "A Better Finder Rename 8…" item to appear in the Finder context menu and in other appropriate contexts, you need to manually activate the service in the "Services Preferences…".

Proceed as follows:

1. go to the Finder
2. open the "Finder" menu and navigate to "Services", then to "Services Preferences…"
   in the "Services Preferences..." application, tick the "A Better Finder Rename 8…"
3. checkbox to activate the service
   
4. optionally use the application to define a hot key for the service
   

The service should now appear in the Finder's context menu. If it does not, or if the item does not appear in the list, there's a few things to check:

• the "A Better Finder Rename 8" application needs to be in the "Applications" folder
  
• you may need to launch A Better Finder Rename by double clicking it once
  
• you may need to log in and out (or restart) for the service to become available
  

These things might be necessary as Snow Leopard checks all applications in the "Applications" and in the "Utilities" folders at start up to find out which applications define system services. A Better Finder Rename also requests that Snow Leopard re-check these folders for newly defined services when it starts up, but this only a request..

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard compatible

A Better Finder Rename 8

Feature-packed batch file renaming with EXIF, MP3, instant preview, multi-step renames, presets and reg ex support.