Automator Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Triggering AppleScripts from Calendar Alerts in Mountain Lion

by Ben Waldie (Mar 18th, 2013)

AppleScripts are great tools for increasing your daily productivity. They're even better when they can be set to run unattended, at night, on weekends or during downtime. In Lion, iCal included a handy option for attaching a script to a calendar event. Just create an event, add a Run Script alarm, ...

More Tips for Troubleshooting Automator Workflows

by Ben Waldie (Mar 11th, 2013)

In my last post, I shared some useful tips for troubleshooting Automator workflow problems. I didn't cover everything, though. There are lots of other ways you can troubleshoot your workflow. Here are some more tips to help. 1. Use Get Selected Finder Items Wisely Automator workflows are ...

Tips for Troubleshooting Automator Workflows

by Ben Waldie (Mar 4th, 2013)

Automator's great for streamlining time consuming and repetitive tasks on your Mac. It's easy. Just launch it, find a few actions, and string them together to form a workflow. Then, run your workflow anytime you want to perform that series of tasks again. What happens if your workflow doesn't ...

Mac 101: Use Automator to extract text from PDFs

by Matt Tinsley (Feb 11th, 2013)

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice (and expert) Mac users. Have you every tried to copy and paste text from a PDF into a word processor document like Pages or Microsoft Word? Most of the time the text loses all its formatting from the PDF, which can be a real pain. Too often I've spent ...

AppleScripting Notification Center > Scheduling Do Not Disturb

by Ben Waldie (Feb 4th, 2013)

Mountain Lion's Notification Center is great for keeping you in the loop, but it can be a huge distraction when you need to get stuff done. Sometimes, a little peace and quiet is all you need to stay productive. As you may know, iOS 6 includes a handy Do Not Disturb feature, which can be turned ...

Use Automator to get the Airport Utility 5.6.1 working on OS X 10.8

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jan 22nd, 2013)

When I acquired a second printer dedicated to making prints and photos, I decided to dig the older Airport Express I have out of a drawer and set it up to be a wireless print server for that printer. However, I ran into a bit of a snafu: the older Airport Expresses require AirPort Utility 5.6.1 ...

AppleScripting OmniFocus: send due tasks to iTunes

by Ben Waldie (Jan 14th, 2013)

OmniFocus is a great tool for keeping us organized. But, let's face it. We're busy people. That's why we need a task management app in the first place. How can you take your productivity to the next level? How about having your daily OmniFocus tasks read to you as you drive to work? With a little ...

Preparing high-res icon files with Automator

by Ben Waldie (Dec 31st, 2012)

This week's post is for all those Mac app developers out there. If you're not an app developer yet, it's a new year, and I'm sure becoming an app developer is at at the top of your resolution list. In any case, if you plan to develop apps, then you need to prepare icons for those apps. Apple ...

Where Automator Actions and Workflows Live

by Ben Waldie (Dec 17th, 2012)

Automator's great for streamlining some of the repetitive things you do each day on your Mac. With Automator, you can create your own custom plugins for the Services menu, Folder Action workflows that run when files are placed into a folder, add-ons for the print window's PDF menu, and more. In ...

Preparing Blog Images with Automator

by Ben Waldie (Dec 3rd, 2012)

Automator's the perfect tool for streamlining some of the repetitive things you do on a daily basis. One thing it's great at is doing basic manipulation to lots of image files. Need to resize a bunch of images or convert them from one format to another? No problem, Automator is ready to help. In ...

Build a photo calendar with Automator

by Ben Waldie (Nov 13th, 2012)

You've seen it in your Launchpad. You've seen it in your Applications folder. It's Automator. It sounds cool. It looks cool. It's got a cool robot icon. But, what can it really do, and why should you care about it? Well, Automator can do lots of things to improve and streamline your OS X ...

Dear Aunt TUAW: Can I turn off Messages logging?

by Michael Rose (Mar 23rd, 2012)

Dear Aunt TUAW, Ever since I started using Messages, it appears to be logging everything it does. Can this be disabled, or can the log file be moved to somewhere out of the ~/Documents folder? Your darling nephew Tommy Dear Tommy, Auntie's tending to the spring turnover of the vegetable ...

Mac 101: Encode media from Automator or the command line in Lion

by Kelly Hodgkins (Nov 22nd, 2011)

There's an easy way in OS X 10.7 Lion to convert video or audio from one format to another, using a fixed suite of conversion settings. One approach uses Automator and can be launched from the Finder. The other uses the Terminal application and the afconvert (for audio) or avconvert (for video) ...

DimScreen simply dims your screen

by TJ Luoma (Sep 19th, 2011)

Once upon a time, I had an application which would dim the screen of my Mac down to 0, and then exit. Somewhere along the way I seem to have lost the app and can no longer find it. Yes, I know I could just hold F1 and do the same thing manually, but I liked having an app that just did it for ...

Ask TUAW Video Edition: PDF and Scripting

by Justin Esgar (Mar 29th, 2011)

Andrew asked us about how to have a folder convert documents to PDF format so that he can sync them to his Dropbox. Today's show goes into how to use Automator and AppleScript to do some scripting, and we're going to demonstrate an iPad app that will convert documents for you on your ...