Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

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.

1. In Automator, choose File→New (or press ⌘-N).

   The templates dialog box appears (shown back in Figure 7-6).

2. Double-click Service.

   You want this puppy to be available from the shortcut menu in programs like Stickies ...