Automator
Automator is the 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 (in a folder called Other). Click its icon to open it. (Automator’s robot icon is supposedly named Otto. Get it? Otto Matic? Stop, you’re killing us!)
Note
Like many other updated Lion/Mountain 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.
In Lion/Mountain Lion, 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 Web browser.
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