One popular feature in MacBook’s Mountain Lion — Automator — can save you a tremendous amount of time behind the keyboard. You use Automator to create applications with a relative of AppleScript called AppleEvents. (In case you’re not familiar with AppleScript, it’s the simple programming language that you can use to automate tasks and applications within Mountain Lion.)
Of course, writing an application might sound daunting — akin to single-handedly building your own nuclear submarine over a long weekend — but Automator is actually easy to use. Heck, you might find it downright fun!
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You can also create workflows, which are sequential (and repeatable) operations that are performed on the same files or data, and then your Automator application can automatically launch whatever applications are necessary to get the job done.
Here’s a great example: You work with a service bureau that sends you a CD every week with new product shots for your company’s marketing department. Unfortunately, these images are flat-out huge — taken with a 12-megapixel camera — and they’re always in the wrong orientation. Before you move them to the Marketing folder, you have to laboriously resize each image and rotate it, and then save the smaller version.
With help from Automator, though, you can build a custom application that automatically reads each image in the folder, resizes it, rotates it, and even generates a thumbnail image or prints the image, and then moves the massaged images to the proper folder.
You’d normally have to manually launch Preview to perform the image operations and then use a Finder window to move the new files to the right location. But now, with Automator, a single double-click of your custom application icon does the trick.
You find Automator in the Utilities folder in Launchpad (or, from a Finder window, in your Applications folder). Currently, Automator can handle specific tasks in more than 80 applications (including the Finder), but both Apple and third-party developers can add new Automator task support to both new and existing applications.
To create a simple application with Automator, launch the application and follow these steps:
Select Application and click Choose.
Click the desired application in the Library list.
Automator displays the actions available for that application.
Drag the desired action from the Library window to the workflow window.
Modify any specific settings provided for the action you chose.
Repeat Steps 2–4 to complete the workflow.
Click Run (in the upper right) to test your script.
Use sample files while you’re fine-tuning your application lest you accidentally do something deleterious to an original (and irreplaceable) file!
When the application is working as you like, press cmd+Shift+S to save it.
In the Save dialog that appears, type a name for your new application.
Click the Where pop-up menu and specify a location where the file should be saved.
Click the File Format pop-up menu and choose Application.
Click Save.
Your new Automator application icon includes the Automator robot standing on a document. Why, most normal human beings would call you a programmer, so make sure that you’re inscrutable from now on! If you’re going to use your new Automator application often, don’t forget that you can make it more convenient to use by dragging the application icon to your Dock or to your desktop.
To find all the actions of a certain type in the Library list, click in the Search box at the top of the Library window and type a keyword, such as saveor burn. You don’t even need to press Return!
If your Automator application should run every time you log in — for example, the application tracks your time on a project — follow these steps to set up the application as a login item:
Open System Preferences.
Display the Users & Groups pane.
Click the Login Items button.
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Click the plus button at the bottom of the list.
Navigate to the location of your new Automator application.
Click Add.
Now your Automator application is really automatic. Watch your significant other gape in amazement as your MacBook begins to work without you touching the keyboard! (If you’ve added the application icon to your Dock, you can also simply right-click the icon and choose Options→Open at Login from the right-click menu that appears. Either way, your MacBook gets the message.)
Automator in OS X Mountain Lion is “programming without writing code.” One of Mountain Lion’s automation tools, Automator enables you to string together prefabricated activities (known as actions) to automate repetitive or scheduled tasks. How cool is that?
Automator does just what you’d expect: It enables you to automate many common tasks on your Mac. If it sounds a little like AppleScript to you, you’re not mistaken; the two have a common goal. But this tool (introduced in OS X Tiger) is a lot simpler to use, albeit somewhat less flexible, than AppleScript.
For example, in AppleScript, you can have conditionals (“if this is true, do that; otherwise do something else”), but Automator is purely sequential (“take this, do that, then do the next thing, and then . . .”).
The big difference is that conditionals allow AppleScripts to take actions involving decision-making and iteration (“while this is true, do these things”); Automator workflows can’t make decisions or iterate.
The upsides to Automator are that you don’t have to know anything about programming, and you don’t have to type any archaic code. Instead, if you understand the process you want to automate, you can just drag and drop Automator’s prefab Actions into place and build a workflow (Automator’s name for a series of Actions).
You do need to know one thing about programming (or computers), though: Computers are stupid! Computers do only what you tell them to do, although they can do it faster and more precisely than you can. But all computers run on the GIGO principle — garbage in/garbage out — so if your instructions are flawed, you’re almost certain to get flawed results.
A similarity between Automator and AppleScript is that it’s up to the developers of the applications you want to automate to provide you the Actions or scripting support. Not all developers do so.
For example, in Apple’s wonderful iLife suite of multimedia applications, iTunes, iPhoto, and iDVD are all AppleScript-able — and they’ve supplied Actions for Automator users. iMovie and versions of GarageBand prior to GarageBand ’09 don’t support AppleScript. Furthermore, iMovie, GarageBand, and iWeb don’t include any Automator actions at this time.
When you launch the Automator application, you see the window and sheet shown here. Choose one of the starting points if you want Automator to assist you in constructing a new workflow, or choose Workflow to start building a workflow from scratch.
Wave xtractor full crack. Choose Service for the sake of this demonstration (you see why in a second). You see the window shown here.
The Library window on the left contains all the applications Automator knows about that have actions defined for them. Select an application in the top part of the Library window, and its related actions appear below it.
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When you select an action, the pane at the bottom of the Library window (Text to Audio File) explains what that Action does, what input it expects, and what result it produces. Just drag Actions from the Action list into the window on the right to build your workflow.
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This particular Service is quite useful. First, select text from any source — a web page, Microsoft Word document, e-mail message, or whatever. Then right-click or Control-click and select the newly created Text-to-Audio Service from the Services menu.
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OS X then converts the selected text into an audio file, which you can have read to you in iTunes at home, or on your iPhone or iPad in the car, on a plane, or just about anywhere. Sweet!
Automator Mac Os Sierra
Automator is a very useful addition to OS X; it’s deep, powerful, and expandable, yet relatively easy to use and master. Do yourself a favor, and spend some time experimenting with ways Automator can save you time and keystrokes. You won’t regret it.