Setup

Dropbox Automator has a simple interface which allows you to set rules to be applied to files that you place in your Dropbox folder. To begin with, however, you need to grant the software access to your Dropbox account. Considering the large number of security breaches that have taken place in 2011, I was a little wary about providing access. My solution was simply to create a new Dropbox account for testing this neat little app.

Use

After granting the app access to your Dropbox account, using it couldn’t be more straightforward. You assign a folder for the set of rules you wish to apply, and then assign the rules for that folder. You can stack rules too, so that it will, for example, convert and e-mail a file.

One thing to be careful of is not to create two rulesets for the same folder that act on the same filetypes. If you do this, you risk creating a never-ending loop. I found this out last night when I did just that and ended up with over 400 e-mails in my inbox for the same two files! What should have happened is that once one ruleset was completed, it was supposed to move the two files to a subdirectory called “processed”. I have a feeling, however, that these files were locked by the other automation process and as a result could not be moved.

Round-up

These shortcomings aside, Dropbox Automator is a powerful tool that has the potential to save you a large amount of time and make your life easier. For example, I do some of my invoicing in Microsoft Word, for customisation purposes. When I have finalised an invoice, I can put it in the Dropbox Automator folder and it will get converted to PDF and emailed to my inbox so all I need to do is forward the attachment on to the end client. This saves me selecting “save to PDF”, and browsing to the attached file in my web browser, and waiting for the file to upload. It’s not a huge amount of time, but if you group all the times I’ve done that together, it probably adds up to a lot.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you have any use for such automation features, I recommend giving it a try. Please post feedback below if you do.

Dropbox Automator

But wait, you’re saying. I don’t want to have to open a recording program every time I have an idea either. That is just as clumsy as writing a new email for the idea. Well, have no fear. You won’t be opening a program to get what you want. You will be using the ease of a keyboard shortcut. How is this possible? With the help of a little known program called Automator. For those of you not familiar with it, this tool is designed to make customized tasks on your Mac easy by automating them. Let’s get started.

Setting Up The Recording Capability

1. Launch Automator by double clicking on the icon in your Applications folder.

2. Click on Workflow and then on Choose.

3. Using the search field in the left of the window, add the following actions: New Audio Capture, Start Capture, and Stop Capture. You can simply search for the names of the actions you want and then click on them to add them to your work flow.

In the start and stop actions, you will see check boxes. Click them. They should read, “Wait For Capture To Complete” and “Close Movie After Stopping”. Configure the top of the window to read Service Receives No Input in Any Application and then save your application with a name that you will remember, such as Voice Reminders or Remotely Nagging Kenny. It is your choice depending on your needs.

4. Close and re-open Automator. Choose “Open existing workflow”, then navigate to and open your file. You should see the same elements in your workflow as before.

5. Click on “Workflow” and then on “Run”.

6. When a recording window appears, begin speaking. When you are done, tap on the space bar to end and save the recording of the file. The file will be saved with the name Audio Recording.mov.

Now that you can record whenever you want, let’s attach your memos to a keyboard shortcut. That way you can make a new memo on the fly.

Adding a Keyboard Shortcut to Record Anytime

1. Open your System Preferences, and choose the Keyboard preferences.

2. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Click on “Services” on the left hand side of the pane. Then on the right choose the “General” heading. You should see your workflow at the bottom of the list. Click to the right of it and a text field will appear. Choose a set of keys for your shortcut and press on them now. Just be sure not to duplicate any existing shortcuts in the process.

Done.

Apple has spent a lot of time in making this tool extremely easy to use for the beginner and at the same time incorporating enough bells and whistles for keeping the power users happy. For a blogger and a mac user, Automator can be quite handy if used correctly.

Now, resizing images is something that almost everyone with a digital camera has to do these days. Whether you’re an average computer user looking to share your photos on Facebook or a blogger looking to upload screenshots of an application to your website, resizing images is a necessity. Considering how important this small function is, it’s actually surprising that modern operating systems don’t come with a built-in feature to automation this task.

Well, if you’re a Mac user, Automator has you covered.

Let’s suppose you’re an amateur photographer and you want to upload all the photos from your recent trip to your website. The photos have all been clicked at the highest resolution possible and you’d want to resize all the images to a respectable 800×600 to save bandwidth and space on your webhost.

Let’s create an Automator script to do this for us.

Fire up Automator and select the Workflow template.

Now, select and drag the Copy Finder Items action to the workflow area. Select a location where you want to copy the working files. These are the images that the next action in the Workflow will work on. Don’t select the Replace existing files checkbox. This is important because if something goes wrong in the workflow, you don’t want to lose your originals too.

The second step is to add the Scale Images action from the library. Drag the action and select a size depending on your need.

If you want to make sure the images are saved in a “Web friendly” format, add the Change Type of Images action from the library. Automator will ask you if you want to add a Copy Finder Items action since the type of the original image is changing. Since we’ve already saved the original images in the first step, you can safely select No here.

Now, save the workflow that you just created to an easily accessible location and don’t forget to select Application as the file type of the workflow while saving.

To use the workflow on a set of images, just select the images in the Finder and drag them onto the Workflow application.

Now, you can browse over to the location that you chose in the first step of the Workflow. Your resized files will be available over there.

There ! Doesn’t that make your work much easier ?

What kind of other routine tasks do you guys perform on your computer everyday ? Have you tried using Automator to help you ?

In Ubuntu (or basically Linux), task automation used to involve writing shell scripts and setting cron job, and this is not an easy thing for a new user to do. Luckily, there is the Gnome-schedule that come with a simple graphical interface and makes task scheduling a breeze.

First, let install the Gnome-schedule,

sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule

For those who prefer graphical interface, navigate to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager. Scroll down till you see gnome-schedule. Check the box beside it and choose “Mark for installation”. Click “Apply”.

Once installed, open up the gnome-schedule (Applications -> System Tools -> Schedule).

A plain and simple window will appear. Do not be surprised by the blank screen, it is meant to be that way, simple and clean.

To schedule a task, click on the “New”. A window will popup to ask if you want to schedule a repeating task or an one time job. Make your selection and click “OK”.

In the next window, you can create a new template so that you won’t have to recreate the same task again and again. You can also insert an icon to the template for easy recognition. Next, set the time for the task to execute and place the link to where the task (or script) is stored.

If you like to set a more precise timing to execute your task, you can choose the “Advanced” tab. This is where you can set the minute, hour, day, month and year of the execution of the task.

Done!