Automator - Yay or Nay?

I find it useless. At least for me, personally. I work with mac 10 hours daily, mostly with graphics and html and I haven't yet needed anything from the Automator.

I've found Automator to be quite useful in the office. I'm currently using it to generate the documents I need for new customers (opening an Excel spreadsheet, creating an OmniOutliner file from a template, a couple of Mail messages and iCal entries). While it has obvious and sometimes frustrating limitations, it's very handy for workflow automation.

If I wanted to learn how to write scripts, I would have done so long ago. But, I just got plain tired of programming (done it since middle school), and I didn't want to bother anymore. I know that there's a way to script what I wanted to do, but when I wanted to add Spotlight comments to a whole bunch of items in the Finder, I decided to try Automator. *Bam*, within two minutes, I was DONE. Never used Automator before, only used prewritten Applescripts a couple times, and haven't written any programs since Turbo Pascal in high school -- and I had completed a custom workflow, soup-to-nuts, almost as quickly as it took to decide even whether to open Automator. Excellent.

I use it a bit, but I haven't had so much success. The first day I installed Tiger, I used it to mess up my iPhoto Library, (hint: DON'T rename iPhoto items in Finder!!!) Since then I've built some minor workflows for things like sending downloaded things from the Desktop to their respective folders. I've tried to get it to add or change spotlight comments, but I can't seem to get that to work. (Any ideas??) But all-in-all I find it to be better in concept than in reality, as the actions are lacking.

There is a good site for information and references about Automator: automator.us It has a complete overview of Automator's features and links to other sites and downloads. Start there. BTW, Ian: You can add AppleScripts to Automator. Use the Run AppleScript action that comes with the default install.

i've found automator to be pretty useless. i've opened it a few times when i had complex tasks that i hoped it could help me simplify, but the workflows could never do exactly what i wanted. i'm sure it might be more useful if i really put the time into learning how to use it, but until then i have no need for it.

I've written some large AppleScripts that run several applications to create complex sets of documents and files. Some of the AppleScripts have even saved me more time than it took to write and debug them! :-) I'm hoping that Automator will at least save me some time in the future, but right now I'm still writing AppleScripts by hand. What would for me be more useful than Automator would be if more applications were recordable.

I use it for quick uploading to my site. I can edit pages of my site locally, or choose images to share, resize them, and auto-login to FTP and put them in the right folders. I wish I could find a good way to watermark the images though.

I'd use it if I could add Applescripts to the workflows. Too many apps don't have Automator hooks in them, but are otherwise scriptable. That makes it kind of annoying.

You can manage your business in a way that works for you