Note on using services under MacOS X 10.2
Under MacOS X a new type of inter-application data transfer was adopted: services. Services are a legacy of OSX ancestor, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. As a former NeXTSTEP programmer I was keen to make service compliant. Thus, you can transfer data to
and export graph from
using the service menu in any application compatible with the cocoa toolkit.
Cocoa toolkit? Yes. MacOS X is still an hybrid system under its current form, the version 10.2. Thus, you have two types of application working in the same environment: Cocoa applications and Carbon application. Very briefly explained, Cocoa applications are fully featured OSX application developed using the most modern aspects of the system. Carbon applications on the other hand are application ported from the "old" OS 9 system, and still use the ancient library, simply upgraded to run under OSX. Thus, carbon application cannot understand services.
Carbon is however a very important aspect of MacOSX since it allowed all the major software companies to port their products rapidly and at a lower cost. Unfortunately, this also means that most of the software existing on this platform to this day are not able to work with services. Thus, you can forget about Excel, Illustrator, Photoshop, Canevas, and a lot of others. I have been successful with using services with Mail, Edit and all Apple applications. The way I see it is simply that is more advanced, and in the future you should be able to use the services already implemented in this software!