Well, that may be a little melodramatic, but no Mac geek can call him/herself a “power user” without at least a basic understanding of Automator. Apple engineers have done miraculous things with OS X, making it the most intuitive, efficient and beautiful operating system possible. But there’s no way to code an OS to be “all things to all people” without it becoming a completely bloated hulk. Microsoft aptly proves my point. Windows tries to be a combination desktop and portable operating system full of features for both, resulting in an OS that’s not really good for either. Conversely, Apple has always maintained iOS/OS X separation despite lots of speculation to the contrary. Two distinctly different operating systems with two distinctly different design philosophies. On the desktop side of things, OS X is focused on providing features to make the user sitting in front of a large(r) (non-touch) screen as capable and productive as possible.
In both their hardware and software products, Apple designs and includes features they deem most useful for 90% of their prospective customers. This design philosophy has obviously paid off. Mac sales continue to escalate even as overall PC sales are in decline. But what about the other 10%? Those who could use everything OS X provides plus a bit more. Apple has realized (quite wisely I might add) that providing every feature wanted by the final 10% would be as large an engineering effort as the one required for the first 90. What to do?
Apple’s solution was to provide a means for easily creating custom workflows, services and applications to perform repetitive or obscure tasks without writing code. It’s called Automator and it was originally released with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in 2005. In the ten years since, Automator has become a development platform in and of itself and boasts a huge user community. Many books have been written about it including a great one to get even the most novice user started, “Automator for Mac OS X, Visual QuickStart Guide” by Ben Waldie. I bought a used copy for less than $10 about a month after buying my first Mac in 2006 and I’ve been using Automator (or apps and services I created with it) almost daily ever since. I’ve even written about one of my favorite Automator apps. It’s one I wrote to automatically connect to my home network shares at login. You can find it in the MacTexan Gearhead section here. I wrote this app shortly after switching because I missed the “Reconnect at login” checkbox available when mapping a Windows network drive. This is a prime example of a more obscure feature Apple decided not to include with OS X and one that Automator seems built for. It was a great project to get my feet wet.
Today, buying a book about Automator almost seems silly. You could spend an entire day perusing the myriad free Automator tutorials available on the web. Hell, an Automator tutorial is almost a contradiction of terms given its simplicity. Besides, if there’s a task you’d like to automate in OS X, chances are someone has already done it and posted it. Remember this: “Good developers create. Great developers steal!” Don’t worry, re-using someone’s Automator workflow, especially one freely published for all to use, cannot be remotely considered stealing. The point is, don’t re-invent the wheel. A Google search for “Automator downloads” yields over 350,000 results. You may not be able to find exactly what you want, but there’s a good chance you’ll find something very close, or at least something to get you pointed in the right direction.
One of the most powerful features of Automator is its ability to include and execute AppleScript within a workflow. AppleScript claims to be a “natural language” programming environment, but that’s bullshit. Show me a person who speaks AppleScript and I’ll show you one deranged individual. Anyway, AppleScript is a very powerful scripting language that’s been around since System 7, about 22 years. Most applications from Apple and many from third-party developers are “scriptable” meaning they include the ability to be controlled or manipulated to some extent by AppleScript. iTunes, Photos, Garage Band, MS Office and Adobe Photoshop are just a few.
Putting AppleScript aside, Automator is very powerful all by its lonesome. There are built-in Automator actions for everything from managing Calendar events to partitioning disks. OS X delivers Automator with a library of hundreds of actions to drag-n-drop into useful, time saving workflows. Add a couple of third-party apps like MS Office and Acrobat and that number quickly doubles. A person could spend days just exploring all the available actions and I encourage every Mac owner to do so. Try creating a service that makes a disk image from selected Finder items or an app that connects to network shares. Believe me, it’s fun and you may just build something useful. I wrote a new one just the other day to resize any image I select in Finder. Before I wrote it, I repeatedly found myself resizing pictures to fit within a blog post. I would use Preview or Pixelmator to open the image, resize it and save it to my site. It only took about five minutes to create a service using Automator to do it all with a single click.
There’s no end to the useful tasks you can create with a few drag-n-drops. As you gain experience, you can create even more powerful ones by incorporating AppleScript and shell scripts. The apps, services and workflows I’ve created probably save me hours a week and they can do the same for you. In fact, anyone claiming to be a Mac Geek who doesn’t use Automator should willfully remove their name from the Mac Geek rolls.