I meet a lot of people with Automator anxiety: they think using OS X’s built-in workflow-maker is a lot more complex than it really is. The truth is that Automator workflows are (a) pretty simple to assemble and (b) great for simple but repetitive tasks that you do all the time anyway.
To show you what I mean here are five workflows that I think pretty much every Mac user should have. They do things we all need to do: Wrap text in quotation marks, for example, or count the number of words in a selection of text. There might be other ways of doing the same things, but Automator is built into your Mac and you can implement them yourself for free in a couple of minutes.
[Read more on Macworld.com...]
A reader recently wrote to me with a problem. Apparently, Microsoft Outlook no longer contains the ability to create quote level chunks of text when replying to messages in plain text format. Why this functionality was removed, I can't say. But, with a little help from AppleScript and Automator, I was able to help the reader to add this functionality back via a Service. Better yet, the Service can be set up to work in any email client, or even systemwide in any app. Here's how you can do it...
Ask the Script Doctor is a regular column in which we solve real-world Mac problems using AppleScript and Automator. If you have a problem you’d like us to solve, send an email to the Script Doctor for consideration.
Your wife’s surprise birthday party is tomorrow. You’ve prepared a top notch slideshow on your Mac using Keynote, and transferred it to your iPad. Great! Now you can present directly from the iPad. There’s only one problem. The fonts in your presentation are no longer appearing properly because the iPad doesn’t have all the same fonts your Mac does. It looks like you might have to lug your Mac along too. No, with Automator’s help, you can just replace the problem text with images. Here’s how... [
12.07.09 - Automator Services: Read Summary of Selected Text.
Episode 26
Vol. 3, Num. 5 - Scripting Text (Part 2).
