Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Automator

Automator is the Mac OS X program that lets you create your own little programs—and your own Services, if you like. Like most programs on your Mac, it sits waiting in your Launchpad. Click its icon to open it for the first time. (Automator’s robot icon is supposedly named Otto. Get it? Otto Matic? Stop, you’re killing us!)

Note

Lion Watch: In Lion, Automator benefits from plenty of small tweaks—and a couple of notable ones. For example, like many other updated Lion programs, Automator now offers Autosave and Versions (Auto Save and Versions). Those are especially useful in a programming app like this; often, you’ll get things working just fine, and then make some change that causes everything to break. No problem; now you can just revert back to the working version.

Automator also includes a handful of new and useful actions, like the Website Popup action described later in this chapter. Another converts text files to ePub (a popular eBook format), and another one converts a word or phrase to an image. Now you can quickly prepare that family cookbook for publishing in the iBookstore, or add a phrase to your blog using some strange and obscure font.

Seven Startup Templates

As you’ll soon discover, 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, you’ll need some way to trigger it—to run it, just the way you run an email program or a ...