Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Mac OS X Automation
with Automator and
AppleScript
When you have some boring, repetitive task to do, you probably wish you could foist
it off on an intern or on a really smart robot. If you have to collate reports or fold
brochures, we can’t help you, but if you’re doing something on your computer over and over,
we’ve got good news.
Meet Otto, the friendly automation robot built into
Mac OS X, shown in Figure 23-1. If you give him a stepby-step
list of things to do, he’ll do them for you with the
speed and accuracy computers are designed for, leaving you
to the creative and interesting tasks to which your brain is
better suited.
From the Applications directory, double-clicking Otto
launches Automator. This intuitive but powerful automa-
Figure 23-1. Otto, the mascot and
application icon for Automator
Automator
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tion tool lets you drag and drop instructions, which can be
saved as workflows and launched anytime you need to get
things done.
Upon launching Automator from the Applications directory, you will be greeted with a template
panel, as shown in Figure 23-2.
Automator’s templates center around the types of data you will be working with; the categories
are Files & Folders, Music & Audio, Photos & Images, and Text. There is also a Custom
option, which just starts you with a blank workflow.
Once you select a starting template, Automator will let you select where the data is coming
from. Typically, the choices will be an iLife application, elsewhere on your machine, or the
Internet.
You’ll then select when the data will be provided. Your choices boil down to providing the
data as part of the workflow, obtaining the data automatically at runtime, or asking the user for
the data. Don’t sweat these choices too much, because you can change them later.
For the purpose of demonstration, select the Text template. Then, from the “Get content
from” drop-down menus below, select User Input and “Ask for text when my workflow runs.”
Then, click the Choose button.
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