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.

One of the applications I really like on my Mac, is Automator. Action(s) is a similar Java based application offering this same functionality on bot Mac and Windows machines. If you are unfamiliar with the possibilities of an automation app, think of it this way; any tedious task like resizing pictures or changing file names can be automated with Action(s).

If you look through some of the preloaded scripts, you will get an idea of how powerful Action(s) can be.

Let’s take a better look at how you might be able to use Action(s) to, well, control some repetitive actions.

Action(s) Basics

After you download the Java installer and open the application by clicking on the icon, you will see a window with a bunch of actions on the left side.

These actions are little previously made scripts. To use them, all you need to do is drag them into the larger window on the right.

The key to making a working Action, is stepping through the process in a logical order. If for some reason Action(s) thinks you may have missed a step, it will ask you.

There are 2 ways to save your workflow.

1. If you simply click Save or Save As, it is treated more as a draft. The Action(s) application starts up and you will need to click Run to start the workflow.
2. Save it as an executable workflow. This will run like a mini application when you click on the icon. Once you have your workflow perfected, this is the recommended way to save your creation.

To save your Action as an executable workflow, click on File, then on Create an executable workflow. A window will pop up asking where you would like to save your Action and what you would like to call it.

Please do no expect Action(s) to know exactly what you are trying to do. Test your Action first. Do not use your only copies of a special occasion assuming your workflow will operate as expected.

Sample Action(s) Workflow

Here are a few ways you can use Action(s) for everyday tasks. I am sure you can think of lots more ways to use the preloaded scripts.

Compose an email using a template

Click on Email in the left sidebar. There is one option Compose Email. Here you can add an address, Subject and even the body of the email.

The example I used was for a weekly status update. You could do just about any kind of email here.

Batch rename photos or files

This Action will save you A LOT of time and typing. The order you add the scripts will determine the layout. I went with a main title, then the way the picture was labeled then date. If you have a number of different albums you would like to rename, you may not want to save this as an executable workflow; it will be easier to edit than rebuild for each album.

Add a filter to an image

Adding a filter to a group of images can take forever. With a workflow like this, you can point Action(s) in the right direction and let it do its thing. I chose to copy the file, just incase the script didnt work as planned on all of the photos. I could go back to the copy if need be.

If you have repetitive required tasks, automation will help you keep your sanity. Even if it takes you 30 minutes to craft an amazing workflow, the end result will save you immense amounts of time in the long run.

What automation scripts do you use?

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 ?

I don’t.

Services is a little used but extremely useful feature of Mac OS X that has been around since a long time but only recently with the release of 10.6 became useful enough to be used by regular users like you and I.

What has changed with the release of OS X 10.6 is that Apple has now made the services menu context aware. So, for example, if you have a line of text selected in TextEdit, only the services for working with that selected piece of text will be visible. Similarly, if you have a file selected in the Finder, only the services useful at that point will be visible.

Another useful thing that Apple has done is that they’ve added support for creating services to Automator, the workflow automation utility that is bundled with OS X. So, creating services has also become that much easier.

Today we’ll take you through the simple process of creating your own service using Automator that will password protect any PDF file that you select in Finder and then let you email them to a friend.

1. Launch Automator from the Applications folder and select the Services template when asked to.

2. From the right hand side of the Automator window, select the context in which the service applies. We’ll select PDF files from the first drop menu and Finder from the second.

3. Now, you’ll have to select the actual workflow that makes the service possible. The workflows are categorized in the Library on the far left sidebar of the automator window according to the type of service that they provide.

Double click the Encrypt PDF Documents workflow and it’ll appear in the right hand sidebar as a part of the service that you’re creating.

Now, enter the password that you want the PDF documents to be encrypted with.

4. At this point, our service is capable of taking a PDF document and encrypting it using the password that we provided. The second step is the email this PDF file. For that we’ll need another workflow from the Library.

Under Library go to Mail and double click the New Mail Message workflow and it’ll be added to your service.

If you have more than one accounts defined in Mail.app, select the one that you want to use for this service, or let the Default Account be used for all emails sent using this service.

What Automator will now do is that it’ll use the first workflow and encrypt the PDF document that is selected in the Finder and then pass that document to the second workflow. The New Mail Message workflow then creates a new email with this document as an attachment and waits for you to enter an address in the To, CC or Bcc fields and then send the email.

Save the service with a descriptive name and automator automatically registers it with the Finder.

You can test it by selecting a PDF file in Finder and calling the Service from the Services menu in the Finder.

As soon as you click the Encrypt and Email PDF service, the selected PDF file will be encrypted with the password that you chose and Mail.app will automatically launch with the encrypted PDF as an attachment.

What other ways do you use Services to improve your efficiency?

This can be very intimidating if you have absolutely no idea what yo do next. Sure you can randomly drag actions into the window then hit run to see what happens. Odds are you will get an error or nothing will happen. After a few times of trying without success, most people give up and tell people on Twitter it sucks.

The first step in the process is to decide what you want automated. The example below is very simple. Batch Image Scale is something I use all the time. I have a couple different image scale scripts for different sizes. Setting multiple versions up may take you a few extra minutes initially, but it saves a lot of time in the future.

Create A Script

1. In your Applications folder, open Automator.app [Cmd + Shift + A]

2. In the first column on the left, choose the an application. When you select an application, the Actions in the second column change.

3. Select the Action you would like to perform. A good place to start is an action like Ask for Finder Item. When setting up a Workflow where there may be multiple files or folders involved, make sure to check Allow Multiple Selection.

4. In some cases a warning box may appear. If this does happen, read it carefully. In this case, the pop up is asking if I want to copy the files and make the changes to the copies. Making the changes to the copies will preserved if anything were to go wrong.

5. In the far left column, click the Preview app. Drag the Scale Images action to the window.

6. Select the pixel or percentage you would like the image scaled to. In this case I chose 500 pixels for this example. If you are taking really large pictures and want to send them via email, you may want to choose a percentage instead.

7. This is what your basic Scale Image workflow should look like.

8. Here is a before and after of the information pane showing the change in dimensions.

9. Now that you know the Workflow does what you want it to, it’s time to save it. In the File menu you are presented with three options: Save, Save As and Save As Plug-in. The Save and Save As options are pretty much the same thing. Both ask you to name the file, choose a location to save it to and in what format you want to save it. The two format choices are Workflow or Application. The main difference is, a Workflow is like a draft which opens in Automator and can be edited. If you save it as an Application, no changes can be made.

The other choice is the Save As Plug-in option. The reason for saving the Workflow as a Finder Plug-in is when you need to resize images in a folder on my desktop, you can CTRL + Click to get the menu. In this menu highlight Automator and there is your Workflow.

Premade Scripts

For those of you who may not be comfortable with making a Workflow/Application in Automator, there are many sites and forums where people post them for free. Some of the people go as far as writing more advanced scripts and use Automator to run those scripts. A while back Damien posted 20+ Useful Automator Scripts. On these sites, there are many other scripts. If the 20+ in the post don’t do it for you, look around on those sites, there are many many more.

Have you used Automator to make any useful scripts?

Automator

Batch renaming in Automator is quite simple, even if you’ve never used it before.

1. Open Automator, choose “Custom” when the screen prompts you to select a starting point.
2. Drag the Automator action “Get Specified Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.
3. Drag the Automator action “Rename Finder Items” to the right-hand window pane.

Note: You will be prompted to add a “Copy Finder Items” action.  If you want to be safe you could add this as well, but I usually don’t.

With Automator you can change the file name in the following ways:

• Date/Time
• Text
• Change Case
• Make Sequential
• Replace Text
• Name Single Item

The options are fairly self-explanatory, but there are some limitations.

Date/Time- you can only add a date or a time stamp, but not both.  The stamp can only be added at the beginning or end of the file name.

Text- You can only add text at the beginning or end of the file name.

Change Case- You can only change the entire file name or extension at once.  You can’t, for example, change moscow.jpg to Moscow.jpg.

Make Sequential- You can only add a sequence at the beginning or end of a file name.

Replace Text- This is where I think Automator really falls short.  You can only replace a specific string, meaning the file name has to contain what you want to replace in order for Automator to do anything. What if I wanted to remove the last 3 characters from a file name and replace it with “xyz”?  Not in Automator.

Name Single Item- I don’t know why you wouldn’t just change the name of the file in Finder without launching Automator, but for completeness the feature is included. You can change the base name (file name without extension), full name (file name with extension), or extension only.

- Choose which action you want and adjust the parameters of the action to suit your needs.

- Drag the Finder items to be renamed into the proper Window.
(Note: with “Get Specified Finder Items“, Automator will not distinguish between directories and files when running.  If you want to drag a folder into Automator and have it work on the folder’s contents, use “Get Folder Contents.”)

- Press “Run.”

Automator is included with OS X and is located in the Applications directory by default.

Name Mangler

Name Mangler picks up where Automator falls short. While Automator has a wealth of other actions that you might find useful, Name Mangler does one thing and does it well.

To rename files, drag them into the left-hand window pane. The list of files pops up, and you can select filters (Folders, Folder Contents, Files) to dictate what gets renamed. This also means you can just drag a Folder into NM to rename the contents.

NM offers the following default options:

• Find and Replace- includes regular expression matching and an option to preserve extensions and ignore case.
• Number Sequentially- Allows you to number in steps other than one, set a prefix and suffix, keep or remove the original name and extension.  Unlike Automator, NM allows you to define a prefix or suffix to the sequence.
• Change Case- Allows Capitalization, all capitals, or all lowercase.  Allows similar preservation or changing of extensions.
• Set Extension- fairly self-explanatory.
• Add Prefix/Suffix- again, self-explanatory.
• Remove/Insert Characters- this is where NM really has an advantage over Automator.  You can remove any number of characters from a file name and specify an index to start with.  So for example if you had a series of files named
  Lyrics_ACT01_Maria.txt
  Lyrics_ACT01_Tonight.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_TheRumble.txt
  Lyrics_ACT02_Somewhere.txt

  You could remove the “ACTXX” characters very easily by defining the number of characters to be removed (5) and the index to start removing at (8- the 8th character from the beginning, starting at 1).  Furthermore, you can replace those same characters by inserting text at a specified index.  Instead of “ACTXX” I might want “WestSideStory.”  To make things even more customizable, you can specify whether the index should count from the beginning or the end of the file name.

But perhaps the most powerful feature included with Name Mangler is the ability to thread together multiple functions in the “Advanced” window. It’s name conversion description language allows you to write pseudo-scripts to tailor your file names to what you want. It might seem a little daunting, but it’s actually very easy for even a beginner with no programming knowledge to pick up the basics after reading the documentation.

Finally, Name Mangler allows you to save your settings as droplets so you can just drag and drop a collection of files to be renamed without actually launching the program.

I use Name Mangler almost exclusively at this point and haven’t found anything that even begins to compare.  Do you know of other free batch renaming utilities?

1. Dashboarder

Dashboarder is a simple application that allows you to toggle your Dashboard on/off so as to conserve RAM when needed while still allowing easy access to widgets. (download link)

2. Maintenance

Maintenance consists of a set of Automator actions that you can use to maintain the health of your Mac. It include features like Repair Permissions, Verify Perference Files, Periodic Cleanup, Clear Cache files, Force empty trash and many other useful tasks. (download link)

3. View with QuickLook

This is an action script that allows you to quickly peek into the content of a selected Finder item without having to open the file. (download link)

4. iCalBirthdays

This is an action script that allows you to create a birthday calendar based on the contacts in your Address Book. What is different from the inbuilt birthday calendar is that you can set an alarm for each birthday and you can combine this action with other actions to publish your .ics file to a Web or file server. (download link)

5 – 9. Automator Actions For Web Designers

This is a pack of 5 Automator actions:

Save for Web

If you are like me, who have to constantly change image extension, resize image and rename image filename, then this application is a great tool for you. This Automator action  can export images in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format either using Adobe Photoshop CS (for higher quality images) or Preview (for faster conversion) without having to open the application. There is also additional options that allow you to resize the image and sharpen the image after resizing.

This action script works as a plugin in your Finder so you can adjust your image with a single click.

Change Extensions

If you need to change a bunch of files extension from one form to another without changing the content of the files (say from html to php), this workflow is a handy tool for you. You can choose to change the file extension for all the files, selected files or all files that have no extension.

Make Names More Web-Friendly

This Automator action converts the names of the selected files to all lowercase, removes accents, changes spaces to underscores or dashes, and converts other special characters to underscores or dashes.

Create Symbolic Link

This Automator action creates a symbolic link for each of the selected files. A symbolic link is similar to an alias, except that many applications, including the Create Clean Archive action, will see only the file points to rather than the alias itself.

Create Clean Archive

This Automator action creates a clean zip format archive (.zip) that’s ready to share with others. Macintosh resource forks and desktop files will be ignored so they don’t get in the way on other operating systems. If you’re uploading the file online, use the action “Make Names Web-Friendly” afterward to ensure the archive has a web-friendly file name. Works great as a Finder plugin, so you can access it with a single click!

(download link)

10. Batch Rename

A workflow that grabs all the files in a specified folder and rename it to the way that you specified. A quick way to get things done if you want to rename a huge library of photos that you have taken during your holidays.

To use it as a plugin in Finder, simply copy and paste the file to ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder/ folder. (download link)

11. Download URLs as PDF

Occasionally, you found a great website that provides great information that can solve your problem. Instead of bookmarking it down (because the website might change anytime), you can grab the URL and save it as a PDF file. You can then store it in your computer and use it for future reference. This action script allows you to download a URL as a PDF file. (download link)

12. Birthday Reminder

This is an alternative to the iCalBirthday application listed above. Instead of creating a birthday calendar, this application checks your Address book and announce to you the persons who are having birthdays on that day. This application is meant to run at startup for full effectiveness. (download link)

13. Photoshop Action Pack

This Automator application consists of 87 Actions for Photoshop CS and CS2 that allow you to control all of Photoshop’s major functions. In addition to the huge assortment of editing actions, the Action Pack includes sophisticated document filtering actions which let you process images based on many criteria including orientation, color mode, image size, file type, and more.

I have not tested this on Photoshop CS3. If you have tested it and find that it works too, do let me too. (download link)

14. Sync Folders

This is a action script that allows you to sync two folders. A handy tool for those who want to do backup of their projects. (download link)

15. Text to PDF converter

A simple utility for creating searchable PDF files from text documents. Simply drag-and-drop any kind of text document on the application icon to quickly convert it to PDF. You may also drag multiple documents at once, or even an entire folder. (download link)

16. FastApps

Fast Apps is a series of applications that allows you to perform some of the daily mundane tasks much easier and faster.

FastBackPic

This app allows you to easily set a photo from your iPhoto, Photo Booth shots and any other standard photo app (including Aperture) as the desktop wallpaper.

FastMusic

Quickly pick and play a song in iTunes.

FastPicImport

FastPicImport lets you select an image and imports it to iPhoto.

FastSongImport

Drag and drop your songs into this app to quickly import songs to iTunes.

FastWebPics

Grab the photos from the current webpage.

FastWebRSS

Quickly convert a website RSS feed into text.

(download link)

17. Simple Photo Editor

Easily apply effects to your image without the need of any external photo editing application. (download link)

18. Quick DMG

Ever wonder how you can create a .dmg archive? This automator application allows you to easily and quickly create your own .dmg archive. Simply drag all the files/folders to the icon to generate the archive. It integrates well with Growl to provide graphical notification so that you know when the building process starts and when it ends. (download link)

19. Movie to iPhone

This workflow takes a movie file, convert it to iPhone/iPod Touch format and import it into iTunes. Next time you sync your iPhone with your iTunes, the movie will automatically get transferred to your iPhone. There are several scripts for different usage pattern. You can use it as a Finder action, Folder action or as a standalone app. (download link)

20. Convert Images to Combined PDF

If you have a bunch of images that you want to email your friends, instead of attaching them as a zipped file, you can convert all of them into a single PDF file and send it to your friend. This workflow can be used as a Finder action. Simply select all the images and choose the Convert images to PDF option in the right-click contextual menu. (download link)

21. Flickr Upload

If you are one of those who upload photos to Flickr regularly, this Automator action script will be useful to you.  You can easily add it to your workflow to upload a single photo or a whole batch. (download link)

22. Lock Desktop

This is a very simple yet useful application. You can use it to lock your desktop quickly and instantly. Whenever you need to get away from your Mac, simply double click on this application to lock your desktop. (download link)

23.Disc Burner

This app lets you burn files and folders to CD, fast and easy. Disc Burner burns files and folders to CDs in just a few clicks and without any external application. If you are using RW CDs, Disc Burner can also help you to erase the CD before burning your files. (download link)

24. Sepialise Me

Easily and quickly add Sepial effect to your effect without the need for external photo editing application (download link)

There are plenty of free and useful Automator action scripts out there and the list covered here is only the tip of the iceberg. I will be keen to know what automator scripts you use and if you have any useful ones to recommend. Share with us in the comments.