Automator on OS X is one of those things I use about once a year, but it always impresses.
Many attempts to use drap and drop to replace programming lead to confusing design. Examples are yahoo pipes, Business Objects, and most of all MS Access.
What’s impressive with Automator is that it always seems it was designed with the very problem you want to solve in mind.
My Problem (apart from the drink)
I use command+shift+4 to get screen grabs a lot. For twitter, for blogs (in fact for this very post), for documents, etc. However I end up with lots of images on my desktop called Picture 1, Picture 2, etc.
I want to keep these, for future use, but want a clutter free desktop.
The problem is, if I try and drag these in to a folder, there will already be a Picture 1, Picture 2 from previous occasions. Leading to annoyingly having to rename every file, or create a sub-directory for each time it runs.
Now I have a simple Automator script.
Each time I run it, it moves everything in to a folder, with the create date in front of the name. It was easy to search for ‘actions’ (‘move’, ‘rename’) and browse (‘Files’ -> ‘Find Files’).
2 responses to “Apple Automator”
Chris,
I read this, thought ‘how useful’, created the workflow, did a screen grab to find that Snow Leopard automagically creates files with the following names: Screen shot yyyy-mm-dd at hh:mm:ss
My hours^H^H^H^H^H minutes of work wasted!
But will no doubt need automator in the future.
Popped in to the Apple Store in Brighton this weekend. Too cool to have a checkout/till, staff randomly walk up to you to offer to take care of paying them for you. Receipts? how not Apple like. They email your receipt. Only mine never showed up.
Didn’t buy snow leopard, did buy a plug. (too recharge iphone/ipod). How exciting.