I wrote to Christian about this a few weeks ago, and no amount of troubleshooting seems to have made a difference.
My DEVONthink service menu items only appear when I move DEVONthink in and out of my application folder and Log out and in again.
They then, routinely, disappear.
As far as I can tell this does not apply to any other services, which are persistent. The DEVONthink services always return when I go through the above sequence. They always disappear. I have removed APE (Fruit Menu and IceCoffee) and it makes no difference. I tried installing the Services preference pane that someone wrote and that recognizes that the DEVON services are supposed to be there, but is not able to activate them.
I believe that this problem stems not from upgrading to 1.9.2 (my original thought) but to when I recently reinstalled a demo of DEVONagent.
However, removing DEVONagent didn’t help.
I don’t understand the structure of Services well enough to troubleshoot this any further on my own.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be sincerely appreciated.
Does moving DEVONthink “in and out” of the Applications folder imply that you installed – or are running – DEVONthink from a location outside the Applications folder?
My standard practice is to put all my appllications in the Applications folder. IMHO that eliminates potential variables that can lead to mysterious behavior – and I’d rather not experience mysterious behavior when I’m working.
Where is DT 1.9.2 installed? Do you have more than one copy of DT installed, perhaps in different locations? If so, which copy or version is actually being launched (check the version number in About DEVONthink)?
Suggestions: Make certain that DEVONthink 1.9.2 is installed in your Applications folder. If you previously had a DT icon in your Dock and have been using that to launch DT, drag that icon out of your Dock (perhaps you weren’t launching the right copy of DT). Then go to the Finder, launch DT 1.9.2 from the Applications folder, and select the new DT icon as a permanent item in the Dock. Are Services in DT working? If not, close DT and log out/log in. Fingers crossed, Services should be working in DT.
DEVONagent installation would not have affected availability of Services in DT.
Note: DT Services will be grayed out if you select text, for example, in an application such as Firefox – for which Services are not available. Open a document in TextEdit and select text. If Services are available, DT is working well. (Services are not available in most Carbon applications because the developers didn’t hook them up. Services are available in Cocoa applicationsl, such as Safari.)
I’m not sure this will fix your problem but have you done routine maintenance lately, like cron routines, etc.? If I was having a problem like this here is where I would start:
Repair permissions using Disk Utility
Run FSCK -F from the startup unix screen repeatedly until informed that no repairs were made and the disk seems to be OK (you get the Unix screen by holding down command and S during startup, before the chime). When given the OK message type Reboot -n to reboot the system.
Run CacheOutX (both internet caches and system)
Run MacJanitor
See if the Services are working normally now. If not I’d consider using DiskWarrior, possibly the wrapper needs repaired.
If you’ve never done any of this you should do it anyway, once in a while, even if it doesn’t resolve your problem.
“I’m not sure this will fix your problem but have you done routine maintenance lately, like cron routines, etc.?”
Yes, I did all the routine cron stuff as well as fixed permissions, ran disk
utilities, etc. Nothing seemed to change. I have not resorted to trying Disk Warrior, I will try that.
“Bill DeVille” wrote:
"Does moving DEVONthink “in and out” of the Applications folder imply that you installed – or are running – DEVONthink from a location outside the Applications folder? "
Sorry, I should have written “out and in” of the Applications folder.
Yes, my only copy of DEVONthink is, and always has been, in my Applications Folder.
This is not a cocoa/carbon thing. It is universal across all applications.
The DEVONthink service menu items are not “greyed-out”: they simply aren’t there.
I had forgotten that I had had saved an old copy of DEVONthink (1.8.5 or something) in a folder called “old DEVONthink” at the root level of my boot drive. I was holding onto it in case the beta of 1.9 I had just downloaded was too unstable to use.
Somehow the system reached out to that old folder at some point (I am now thinking it was when I upgraded to 10.3.8.) and saw that it had Services connected to it (i still don’t understand this whole Services menu structure, but whatever) and was attempting to use them unless somehow forced to look at the new DEVONthink app in my applications folder. After a while, for whatever reason it would look at that old app’s services, which were disabled. So they didn’t work.
Anyway I don’t understand how it all worked, but deleting the old version of DEVONthink and logging back in cleared everything up.
Thanks for all the advice: everyone was partially right.