I stumbled upon a great example of the Snow Leopard Services that I've been drooling over. The S3 Upload Service by August Lilleaas is available as a workflow which can be opened in Automator, so you can examine its inner workings. It uses AppleScript and Ruby, easily passed back and forth thanks to Automator's building-block-style workflow. It lets you upload a publicly-accessible file to an S3 bucket, and copies the URL into your clipboard upon successful upload.

The workflow requires that you at least have RubyGems installed, and have an Amazon S3 account set up, but it will handle the rest. It asks for your S3 credentials with an AppleScript popup, which has the unfortunate side effect of not being able to be forced to the front very easily and tends to get lost behind other windows. There are workarounds to that, but no way to keep it on top once it's up. It looks possible to build custom nibs for your services, so I might play around with making a general-purpose utility panel popup to fill the void in my own projects.

In the process of rolling my own Services in Snow Leopard, I've definitely found some limitations, but I'm having fun working around them. This one is a great example of passing results -- returned from different languages -- and processing them, all within Automator. It's not super-polished -- your mileage may vary -- but a big thanks to August for putting it out there for the rest of us to play with!

One of my favorite new tools is Dropzone from Aptonic Software. Cory mentioned it back in early beta, but it's come a long way since then. Dropzone lets you set up "destinations," and when you click its icon in the dock it pops up a HUD-style window with icons for each destination. You can drop files and text onto each icon, or have them launch apps and run scripts with a click. It comes with ready-made destinations for everything from Flickr uploading of dropped images to zipping and emailing a collection of dropped files. The beauty of Dropzone is that the average user can set up all of the destinations they would normally launch other apps for, but users in more advanced stages of geekery can construct their own destinations using the Ruby-based Dropzone API.

My personal Dropzone setup includes destinations for creating projects or opening files in TextMate, opening a folder in GitX, sending files to my Amazon S3 account (puts a publicly-accessible url in my clipboard), filing based on OpenMeta tags, mounting and unmounting FireWire drives, making quick Backpack reminders, and the list goes on. I've even got one that scans dropped text for "http://" links and creates a linkbun.ch for me. Some of these scripts I've written, some were just a matter of customizing the existing destinations. Either way, I've got all of these capabilities no more than a click or drag away.

Creating your own destinations just requires a little Ruby-fu. "But I'm the farthest thing from a level 12 Ruby Mage," you say. Don't sweat it, let the community do it for you. Several scripts from my personal setup, along with a great selection of others, are available in the user-contributed actions section of the Aptonic Software website. Additionally, included actions like the application launcher allow full customization just by selecting the application to trigger.

Dropzone is available for a free trial, and can be had for $10US. Give it a try and see if it doesn't speed up your workflow. If you create any scripts you'd like to share, be sure to let the author know!

Parties can sometimes be boring, but with a Mac with an iSight and an Apple TV, you can liven up any party! In this how-to, I am going to show you how to create an Automator workflow that will take pictures at specified times and sync them over to your Apple TV, all without you ever lifting a finger. This Automator workflow is fantastic when you have people over for a party they can head over to your Mac, take a crazy picture of themselves and have it synced over to the Apple TV in the living room.

Continue reading to learn how to make this Automator workflow.

Photon, the speedy digital photo workflow app and labor of love from Mike Bernardo's Green Volcano Software, has been updated to v1.1.

Photon differs from Aperture, Photoshop, and the like by focusing on the front end of the photography workflow. Importing RAW images from DSLRs is fast, and Photon's stacking feature simplifies sorting and culling your photos. The update includes:

• An overhauled caching engine to improve import speed and responsiveness
• A "Discards" stack for unwanted image files that provides a direct route to Trash
• A "File stack" feature for moving existing files to a new spot on your hard drive(s)
• Improved memory card download performance
• The ability to save and recall stacks when re-launching the app.

The update is free to registered Photon users, or you can buy Photon for $69 (Universal Binary).

Thanks to Mike B. for the tip!

Don't have time to read that Word, Pages, or TextEdit document at your desk? Why not listen to it on your iPod instead? In this Automator how-to, I am going to show you how to create an audio file using text that you have in an open document, then sync that using iTunes to your iPod or iPhone.

Creating the workflow
For this workflow, you need the following Automator actions (placed in the same order):

• Get Contents of TextEdit Document
• Text to Audio File
• Import Files into iTunes

Continue reading to learn how to build this workflow.

A few people commented on my first Mac Automation post that they didn't understand Automator. This post will clear that all up.

AppleScript is very powerful, but it has a learning curve. When Apple set out to make Automator, they tried to make an automation environment that not only gave the user flexibility, but also power. Apple includes several actions that programs can use; they also include a plug-in type model for developers of Mac software to add even more actions.

I'm going to tell you a secret, that I hope we can keep between us: I am a big fan of blogs and blogging. I love to write and I love to read, so blogging is a natural extension of that (and I hope my level of enjoyment makes its way into my posts here). WordPress is the hottest blogging tool out there. It is open source, dynamic, and all the cool kids use it. Sadly, while content is king, people also love a pretty face.

Circle Six Blog has a great post up that outlines Brett's workflow for designing WordPress themes locally on his Mac. He lists a number of useful apps that we have covered on TUAW and includes some good general web design tips.

Aperture is Apple's tool designed for professional photographers who take lots and lots of pictures. As such, handling metadata is an important part of any workflow involving Aperture. James Duncan Davidson has some tricks to help you get the metadata you need into Aperture as quickly as possible. I'm sure this will save someone some time out there.

Ben Long has released a v2.2 update to his most excellent set of Photoshop Automator Actions, a collection of over 70 workflow-enhancing actions for automating everything from switching color modes to cropping images and even archiving them to a disc. New in v2.2 is Intel Mac compatibility (some actions simply wouldn't work) and two new actions - Filter by File Type and Assign Custom Profile. Of course, there are the obligatory bug fixes and enhancements, so check out Ben's announcement post for details on this excellent action pack, and scroll down quite for details of this specific v2.2 release.

Photoshop Automator Actions are donationware and available from Ben Long at Complete Digital Photography.

Aperture Tricks is devoted to, shockingly, tips and tricks for everyone's favorite photography workflow solution made by Apple. If you are obsessed with Aperture news, or just want to get the most bang for your photogenic buck then Aperture Tricks is the place for you.

"Show off your latest feat of programming genius," says the Apple Developer Connection email announcing the call for entries to their 11th annual Design Awards. Recognizing "technical excellence and outstanding achievement in developing Mac OS X software," there are eight award categories into which developers can submit their apps: Best Mac OS X Developer Tool, Best Use of Mac OS X Graphics, Best Widget, Automator Workflow, User Experience, Game, Scientific Computing Solution and Student Product.

As far as what winning developers receive for all their hard work, Apple's going all out this year. Each category winner receives two 15-inch MacBook Pros, two 23-inch Cinema Displays, an ADC Premiere Membership, a WWDC 2006 E-ticket, and an exhibitor space at Macworld 2007. The Student category winner will receive one 15-inch MacBook Pro, one 23-inch Cinema Display, one 60GB iPod, an ADC Student Membership, and a WWDC 2006 Student E-ticket. Does anyone else find it odd the non-student members don't receive an iPod? And how about the lack of PowerMac prizes?

The entry deadline is June 16th, and the winners will be honored at WWDC in August.

As we Mac fans and users must concede, we do still live in a Windows world. For those of who also work in a Windows world (including banging your heads against a wall), I've found a site that could help Windows and OS X shake hands and (dare I say it) work together better: MacWindows.com. Need to learn about using a Mac with Active Directory? How about using Mac OS X Server with Windows clients? Cross-platform file sharing, Exchange server and applescripts for converting file names - it's all here. This site gets pretty in-depth on a lot of these topics, and it looks like the best one-stop resource I've seen to help with all those OS X Windows-related headaches.

A post yesterday at MacSlash asking how useful Automator really is inspired me to bring the question to the TUAW audience: do you use Automator? Do you find it useful or useless? I know plenty of workflows make their way through the TUAW postings, and I'm personally a huge Automator fan and user for some of my daily work, but I'm wondering about the rest of you. Have you already deleted the application, or are there workflows with a reserved space in your startup items? Sound off in the comments.

Creating actions with Tiger's Automator is fun, easy for most users and certainly useful. If you're like me, you already have more than a few custom workflows floating around. "More than a few" can become an unwieldy crowd quickly, which is why I like Automatic so much. Automatic is an Automator action that lists all of your existing workflows and allows you to launch any with a single mouse click. Automatic also includes a dock icon that offers similar access to all your workflows. Pretty nice.