Once installed, simply highlight a phone number, then Control-click (or Right-click if you have a multi-button input device) and select “Dial Selection” from the Dialectic submenu and the selected number will be dialed using your current Location & Dialing Rules. The contextual menu also allows you to dial the contents of the clipboard without selecting anything.
Note: As of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), Apple has changed the way Services & Contextual Menu Plug-Ins work. Accordingly, Dialectic now includes a separate Service workflow which will be installed in your user’s Services folder if either (or both) the Dialectic Services Menu or Dialectic Contextual Menu Plug-In are enabled. This Dialectic Service workflow will automatically add a contextual menu item named “Dial Selection with Dialectic” when you select text and Control-click (or right-click) on it. Selecting this menu item will, of course, send the selected text to Dialectic to dial.
When using the Dialectic Contextual Menu to dial numbers that contain letters in place of numbers (mnemonic phone numbers), if you have enabled the option to “Convert Mnemonics” in the Dialing preferences before sending the number to Dialectic to dial, the contextual menu will convert all letters to their corresponding phone number digits. If this option is not enabled in the Dialing preferences, the contextual menu will extract only the digits of the selection to send to Dialectic for dialing. In either case, if the contextual menu detects a long number (more than 15 digits) or a short number (fewer than 7 digits) it will ask for confirmation before sending the number on to Dialectic for processing.
The menu items you will see in the Dialectic submenu of the current contextual menu:
- Dial Clipboard Dials the contents of the clipboard.
- Dial Selection Dials the current textual selection.
If you are concerned about misdialing, enable the Dialing Confirmation option in the Dialing preferences. For additional options, once the contextual menu is displayed, hold down the Option key to see alternate menu items:
- Dial Clipboard...
- Dial Selection...
These are used to open the main window and enter the number in the “Number to Dial” field without actually dialing the number. You can then modify the number as desired and confirm that you really want to dial this number.
Limitations
There are some applications that do not work with the Dialectic Contextual Menu. Two notable applications that don’t work with the contextual menu are Firefox & FileMaker Pro. To work around these limitations, use the Firefox Extension or, in the case of FileMaker Pro, use the native AppleScript dialing support to trigger the dialing command from a script embedded in your database.
See the Online Resources for example scripts & FMP databases with embedded commands for dialing Dialectic:
