January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
305 pages
6h 29m
English
Content preview from Take Control of Automating Your Mac, 6th Edition
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Discover macOS Automation Technologies
As we’ve seen so far in this book, macOS offers lots of ways to automate individual activities. But some automation tasks require apps to talk to each other (or even to other computers), employ sophisticated logic or user interaction, or perform specialized functions that are unique to your situation. When simple tools aren’t up to the job, it’s time to bring in the heavy hitters.
In the next five chapters, I talk about a subset of technologies that go considerably deeper than things like keyboard shortcuts or text expansion. These technologies—Automator, AppleScript, services, shell scripts, and Shortcuts—aren’t so much tools as platforms built into macOS that you can use to create your own tools. As such, ...
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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.
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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.