Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

Workflows as Programs and Plug-ins

Building an Automator workflow is a satisfying intellectual exercise and a delicious talent to acquire. But if the point of all the effort is to create a timesaving, step-saving software robot, there seems to be something missing. Are you really going to open the Automator program just to run a workflow you've written? Fortunately, that's not necessary. You can save a workflow as a regular, double-clickable application, if you like, or embed it in shortcut menus all over your Mac.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Checking a Workflow's Progress

Some of these actions take their sweet time. Is there some progress bar that will tell me how far along my workflow is?

Actually, Automator provides two ways to check on the status of your workflow: the simple way (call it "the Indicator") and the Action Log.

The Indicator lies in the lower-right corner of the Automator window. When your workflow is running, a little status message appears here to tell you exactly which action is running at the moment. You can use that information, along with some common sense, to figure out how close your workflow is to being finished. If the workflow has run its course, the Indicator says,"Workflow Execution Completed."

(You can also identify whatever action is running at this moment, thanks to the spinning-sprocket indicator in its lower-left corner. But if you have a tall stack of actions, you might not be able to see the action that's currently running. The list doesn't automatically ...