I meet a lot of people with Automator anxiety: they think using OS X’s built-in workflow-maker is a lot more complex than it really is. The truth is that Automator workflows are (a) pretty simple to assemble and (b) great for simple but repetitive tasks that you do all the time anyway.
To show you what I mean here are five workflows that I think pretty much every Mac user should have. They do things we all need to do: Wrap text in quotation marks, for example, or count the number of words in a selection of text. There might be other ways of doing the same things, but Automator is built into your Mac and you can implement them yourself for free in a couple of minutes.
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Apple's Contacts app includes a lot of great shortcuts for initiating different forms of communication. Just click an email address, phone number, or URL field label to display a list of available options. You can send an email, show a phone number in large type, or start a FaceTime call, for example. Curiously, one shortcut that's absent from most of these popups is one for copying the email address, phone number, URL, etc. to the clipboard. Mailing addresses are one exception, as they provide an option to copy a mailing label. But, other fields don't include this option. Sure, you could just select a phone number, email address, URL, etc., and press Command+C to copy it. But, what fun is that? It sure would be nice if there were just more handy copy to clipboard shortcuts instead. With the help of AppleScript, you can add your own. Here's how...
For years, AppleScript Studio provided scripters with a framework, through Xcode and Interface Builder, for implementing Cocoa interfaces in AppleScript-based apps. When it comes to AppleScript, end users are often accustomed to faceless apps that simply run when launched and quit when finished, with minimal feedback along the way. AppleScript Studio gave developers the power to implement feature-rich and user-friendly interfaces, which allowed users to configure script behavior, displayed progress during processing, and gave scripts the look and feel of virtually any other OS X app.
Whether I'm preparing for a demo or writing an article, blog post, book, or technical documentation, I often find myself performing the same set of repetitive steps. I need to navigate into an app's packaged resources folder, find one or more icon files, occasionally convert them to PNG and scale them, and add them to my document, Keynote presentation, etc. Fortunately, this doesn't need to be a manual process each time, thanks to the following AppleScript.
In February, I provided instructions for using AppleScript to send completed task reports from OmniFocus to Evernote. The script was quite well received by readers, and I received numerous requests for enhancements. This post provides an updated version of the script, which includes a number of additions. The script now supports full project paths and additional task details including the context, estimated time, start date, modification date, completion date, and notes. This additional content is optional, and you can adjust the script to not display it if you wish.
A reader recently wrote to me with a problem. Apparently, Microsoft Outlook no longer contains the ability to create quote level chunks of text when replying to messages in plain text format. Why this functionality was removed, I can't say. But, with a little help from AppleScript and Automator, I was able to help the reader to add this functionality back via a Service. Better yet, the Service can be set up to work in any email client, or even systemwide in any app. Here's how you can do it...
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You're in the kitchen cooking dinner, or sitting down watching TV, or exercising. Ding! You have a new email. Quickly, run to your Mac to see who it's from. Meh, spam. Ding! Meh, a message from your boss. Ding! Meh. Sure would be nice if Mail could announce who's emailing you. That way, you could just listen for ones you care about. Well, with the help of AppleScript and Mail rules, you can set this up on your own. Think of it as an audible caller ID, but for email.
AppleScript's are great tools for increasing your daily productivity. They're even better when they can be set to run unattended, at night, on weekends, or during downtime. In Lion, iCal included a handy option for attaching a script to a calendar event. Just create an event, add a Run Script alarm, point it to the desired script and you're good to go. Things changed in Mountain Lion, though. Presumably for security reasons, the Run Script alarm option was removed from the Calendar app. Despite its removal, however, there are still some ways you can trigger scripts from Calendar events.
