Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

CHAPTER 23 MAC OS X AUTOMATION WITH AUTOMATOR AND APPLESCRIPT 405
You can filter the items showing in the right column by typing in the search field at the top
of the column. Selecting an item in the right column will show a description in the details pane at
the bottom of the sidebar. The details pane can be shown or hidden by clicking the disclosure
button in the lower-left corner of the window.
You can create your own groups and smart groups from the group view’s context menu or
from the action (gear) menu in the lower-left corner of the Automator window.
In Tiger, actions were grouped by which application provided them. In Leopard, the actions
are grouped by the category of data they work on:
Calendar: iCal calendars, events, and To Do items.
Contacts: Address Book contacts information.
Developer: Xcode, SQL, CVS, and other developer tools.
File & Folders: Finder items and tasks, including moving, copying, and deleting items;
setting the desktop picture; and setting Spotlight comments.
Fonts: Font Book management tasks and metadata.
Internet: Web and RSS data, including extracting, filtering, and loading URLs.
Mail: Mail tasks, such as getting, filtering, displaying, and sending e-mail messages.
Movies: QuickTime, iMovie, iDVD, and DVD Player actions.
Music: iTunes and iPod actions, as well as the immensely useful Text to Audio File action.
PDFs: Preview actions for creating, controlling, or extracting data from PDF documents.
Photos: iPhoto, Preview, and QuickTime actions for getting, manipulating, and organizing
photos. This also includes actions for controlling digital cameras and the iSight web
camera.
Presentations: Keynote actions for controlling slide show presentations.
Text: TextEdit actions for creating, editing, and working with text documents.
Utilities: System services and Automator control actions, such as burning a disk and
presenting different kinds of dialogs, as well as the immensely useful Run AppleScript,
Run Shell Script, and Run Workflow actions.
Other: Theoretically, this group would contain actions that somehow don’t fit into other
groups. In practice, it’s up to developers to define which groups their actions should be
sorted into. If this information is not provided, the action ends up here.
NOTE Your categories may differ based on which applications you’ve installed. For example,
the Developer category probably won’t exist if you haven’t installed any developer tools.
With the default actions, grouping by application or grouping by category is a largely irrelevant
distinction. Apple’s included applications tend to center around a specific type of data
anyway.
However, when you install third-party applications, they will often add actions to Automator.
You can also download actions from the Web that may or may not use applications to do
their heavy lifting.
The more actions you have, the more the category grouping becomes useful. You can toggle
between application or category grouping from the “Arrange Actions by” submenu of the View
menu.