October 2011
Intermediate to advanced
928 pages
34h 56m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Lion: The Missing ManualBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Building Your Own Workflow
You could spend all day playing with the workflows Apple gives you, making minor tweaks and seeing how they affect the workflow’s progress. You could even download more preassembled workflows from http://macscripter.net or www.macosxautomation.com, if you were so inclined.
Still, those options don’t give you the kind of hands-on experience you need to automate your Mac on your own. That’s why the following pages walk you through building two different Automator workflows from scratch. Along the way, you’ll learn several tricks that you’ll find handy when you start building your own workflows.
Tip
If you’re feeling lazy, you can download the completed workflow projects from this book’s “Missing CD” page.
Build Your Own Web Browser
Quick Look is great for previewing Mail attachments and files in the Finder without opening them. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could do the same for a Web address you find in a document? Who wants to go through all the trouble of opening up Safari for something you might not even care about? Well, with the new Website Popup Automator action in Lion, now you can create your own Quick Look URL Service.
Note
In Lion, Mail offers Quick Look for Web addresses—but the following steps let you add that feature to any other program, too.
In Automator, choose File→New (or press ⌘-N).
The templates dialog box appears (shown back in Figure 7-6).
Double-click Service.
You want this puppy to be available from the shortcut menu in programs like Stickies ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.