What Is Automator (and Can It Make Your Life Easier)
Pages: 1, 2, 3
Note that there isn't a single action to create a new mail message with a set of attachments all as one step. You actually have to open a message and pass the attachments to the message as separate actions. Here's how it all looks in Automator:
You can email a screenshot, but you'll have to fight the style guidelines to do it.
As you can see, you have to fight the style guidelines pretty hard to make something like this happen, but it's possible and wasn't too difficult to do in this case. You can get the workflow for emailing a screenshot here.
Looking Ahead
Streams of discussion all over the net seem to point to the same common complaint with Automator: there just aren't enough actions available to take care of routine business. While Automator comes packaged with almost 200 actions out of the box and you can find more out at Apple's Automator Actions site, you'll find that there's still room for plenty of work to be done. Lots of it. Apple could give Automator a tremendous boost if it provided an update with 500 or so additional actions for the core applications that come packaged with Tiger. For example, open up Automator's System library and take a look. On Tiger 10.4.2., there's a whopping seven actions. I'm sure we can all think of five or ten times that amount that would be handy to have available. The same goes for just about all of the other core applications, although some are outfitted better than others.
There's a lot things that Automator could do if only the actions were available to create useful workflows. As things stand right now, you'd have to be pretty darn crafty, and do some scripting and Cocoa voodoo to create all of the actions you'd need to truly automate most of your routine workflows. Unless you are a developer just looking to make the world a better place, you probably don't have the time to develop a series of custom Automator actions to accomplish workflows that you could continue doing manually.
But alas, Automator is still just a tyke and it's still got a lot of growing to do. By pinging the developers of our favorite apps whenever we need an action that would make our lives easier, we can do our part to see that cute little robot grow up. Apple has a designated line just for Automator feedback, which would be a good place to vent your frustrations when you find that Automator could use a little more Cupertino pizzazz. For that matter, any serious developer is likely to listen to you if you're a paying customer, or you'd otherwise be one if the right actions were available. In the end, it all goes back to the same old supply and demand relationships that work everywhere else in the world. For some interesting reading, check here to see the case Apple makes for developing Automator actions and here to read about Bare Bones' decision to be an early supporter of Automator.
If you need actions for open source software, web-related tasks, or you just want to jump in and immortalize yourself forever in Automator glory, you can develop and distribute your own actions. There are a slew of resources out there to get you up and running. Matt Neuberg's Write Your Own Automator Actions tutorial is a good starting point that'll set you up for moving on to Apple's definitive reference: the Automator Programming Guide.
Matthew Russell is a computer scientist from middle Tennessee; and serves Digital Reasoning Systems as the Director of Advanced Technology. Hacking and writing are two activities essential to his renaissance man regimen.
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Showing messages 1 through 7 of 7.
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using automator to create a photobooth picture taker
2005-09-11 21:25:07 ejoe [Reply | View]
How easy would it be to use automator to take 4 pictures using the iSight at 5 second intervals, crop and resize the pictures to fit on a 4 by 6 inch frame, and then print them out - photobooth style? I think this action would be a great way for Apple to demo the power of photobooth. -
using automator to create a photobooth picture taker
2005-09-12 17:15:48 Matthew Russell |
[Reply | View]
The best way to get this done would be to ping an existing developer of a photo booth type application (there's a few out there) and request the action, because they've already written the core code...but if you don't want to do that...
As it stands right now, I don't think that the "Take Picture" action bundled with Tiger supports the iSight; at least it didn't with mine. Hence, you'd need to write an action for that. I might get around to it in a bit if no one else does, as I've had to do a lot of image processing lately with mine.
The other issue is doing the pretty print. That involves digging into the Cocoa docs for printing and might be a bit time consuming if you've never dealt much with those frameworks. Alternatively, you might be able to use a fink tool like "mpage" to print 4 images per page...but there wouldn't be a nice border like you're probably expecting.
So in short, it would take some time because the two core actions just don't exist. If I supply the iSight action, does anyone want to start cranking on the pretty print?
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minor correction
2005-09-07 15:26:13 has01 [Reply | View]
> It leverages the power of AppleScript to provide a drag-and-drop workbench for streamlining repetitive tasks.
This isn't completely correct: Automator actually provides three APIs - Cocoa, OSA and stdin/stdout - giving Actions access to a much wider range of implementation languages, system services and third-party resources than are available via AppleScript alone. Anyway, good article.
HTH -
voodoo
2005-09-07 16:02:57 Matthew Russell |
[Reply | View]
Good point. I briefly alluded to Cocoa voodoo at one point, but I could have brought that out more (guess I've just noticed that most of the things I ran across are using AppleScript right now). But you're absolutely right: You can leverage just about anything you want, really, because you can call through from within Objective-C/Cocoa...a very nice thing indeed.
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oops
2005-09-07 02:10:24 iay [Reply | View]
So, at least on my system (MacOS 10.4.2) the example workflow renames the files and labels them with Spotlight comments as expected.
However, iPhoto doesn't know about this (well, I guess it hasn't been told) with the result that iPhoto continues to think the files exist with their old names in its browser. If you try and open any of the "old" files, iPhoto helpfully creates an empty file of that name and hangs while attempting to load it.
The "new" files aren't visible from iPhoto. To unwedge things I had to trash the "old" (non-existent) files in iPhoto, manually move the "new" files out and re-import them.
Maybe I did something stupid while transcribing the example, but this really doesn't bode well for application integration using Automator. -
iphoto madness
2005-09-07 12:03:31 Matthew Russell |
[Reply | View]
Hmmm.
Typically, I'll import my images into iPhoto so that they're available in iWork, etc. but otherwise I'll usually use another means of editing/opening them. (I'll usually track things down in Spotlight and drag the images down to another app for opening -- effectively bypassing the arguably idiosyncratic behavior of iPhoto you described.)
With all that said, it's unfortunate that iPhoto behaves that way, and I really think it's more a reflection of an iPhoto issue than Automator...although Automator did make it easy to do this.
But for the renaming thing -- it sounds like the simplest solution is to either leave the rename step out completely, or introduce a "copy" step that would copy the images you're looking to tag/rename to another location besides iPhoto (like if you were getting ready to burn a disc or something along those lines that could benefit from sensible image names). Obviously neither of these thoughts help if you want to rename images that are already in iPhoto and you use iPhoto for all of your image needs, however.
Perhaps you could do a workflow to rename things sensibly as you pull them off of your camera and then pass them to iPhoto for import.
Guess it's a good thing that the "Can It Make Your Life Easier" part is an open question ;)
