If you want to know how to make your life easier, take a look at the Automator app in Mac OS: a free downloadable program that offers dozens of different ways to do anything on your computer. You can set up a series of keyboard shortcuts, so that every time you press Cmd + C and Cmd + V (for copy and paste), or Cmd + E and Cmd + F (for cut and paste), or Control + Space bar and Shift + Control + Space bar (for “paste as plain text”), the corresponding function is performed automatically when you next click these keys. Or you can create a series of programs that run automatically in response to certain events, such as when you plug in an external hard drive or change your email address.
Automator is an automation app in Mac OS: it offers lots of ways to automate everything from copying files to deleting them. It’s very useful if you have too many different actions to perform with the mouse.
Automator is a Mac OS X application that lets you put together workflows for repetitive tasks. The basic idea is to load up a list of actions that you want to perform, and then click “Run Script” to execute them all at once.
I use Automator all the time. For a while I was using it to turn voice memos into text files, but I now do the same thing with text in Mail (select all, choose Format > Make Plain Text). There’s a lot of other apps that do something similar.
One big advantage of automator is that it lets you define your own actions and build your own workflows. You can have one workflow handle everything related to your job; another one handle your personal finances; a third one handle email. It’s as flexible as you want it to be.
I came across Automator about a year ago, when I was looking for ways to make my life easier. My wife and I have a family of four, with two teenage daughters. We live in Tokyo, Japan. The girls are Japanese high school students, and so we spend half of their time at school and half of their time at home.
Like most people who live in Japan, we have the option to send them to the United States to spend a few months with their grandparents. But we don’t want them to feel like they’re not part of our family; we want them to be able to come and go as they please. Automator is one way we’ve found to do that.
Automator allows us to set up scripts that run on our Macs automatically when certain functions occur. For example, if an email arrives from our daughter’s school with a subject line such as “Announcement,” Automator will run a script that takes this address and turns it into something more readable like “Announcement from High School.” If the message has attachments, Automator will turn them into smaller attachments, which can be handled without any loss of data or quality. And if you’re using Microsoft Outlook, Automator will create tasks for your calendar or
I have an iPhone, and even though I use it like a desktop PC, I still find it very useful. One of the things that makes me want to use it is Automator , which is really just a fancy name for a simple feature: you can set up little scripts that run automatically. Automator is great for automating repetitive tasks so that you don’t have to do them manually.
With automator, you can create tools that do things like:
– Put your photos into different folders based on the date they were taken
– Tidy up files in your iTunes library based on criteria such as whether or not you’ve listened to them/the number of times you’ve played them/the date they were last played/etc.
– Write out all the ingredients in your cupboard (if you like baking) and make recipes based on what’s in your cupboard
– Create a tiny plasmacaster to do a couple of simple tasks with photos, including adding tags and geotagging.
Automator is a program for automating repetitive and tedious tasks in Mac OS X. It does many of these by looking at the text of your Mac’s applications (in particular, their help files). So Automator is also useful as a kind of code sandbox: you can write your own apps inside Automator, and test them there.
For example, one thing I do is to record my time in different logs to use when I’m working on a project. But my project files are static text files, so I have to be careful about saving them with the right file name and timestamp.
So I wrote a Logging app that puts a timestamp in every line it writes. It also prints out the name of the file it’s generating.
A code sandbox is a special kind of file used by Automator to make it easier for programmers to test their ideas. It looks like a folder, but it is in fact an invisible directory that can keep all kinds of resources hidden from your other programs.
An automator action is stored inside the sandbox, and you can create new automator actions to manipulate the files in the sandbox. All the files in the sandbox are automatically copied into the “parsed folder” of your project, so you can add them to your project as resources just like any other files.
This shows how to use Automator to call an Apache service and set its environment variables:
Code is a way to tell the computer what to do. So if you are writing a program, you’re writing code. If you are writing a blog post, you’re also writing code: it’s just invisible to you.
The most important code is your own. Your body knows how to walk, but it doesn’t know how to type on the keyboard. Your brain knows how to think about music, but it doesn’t know how to write software that can make music. That’s why programmers have inventors’ hearts and artists’ souls.