By Ben Waldie One of Automator's key limitations is its inability to perform branching. In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how AppleScript can be used to work around this limitation and create a branching Automator workflow. | 10:34 | Feb 23, 2010 |  |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie discusses how to create AppleScripts that run at scheduled intervals. Learn to write scripts that back up your music library at night and automatically reconnect to server volumes. | 8:39 | Jan 26, 2010 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie discusses how to drop scripts in AppleScript. Learn how to write a simple image processing AppleScript application that processes dropped files and folders. | 7:49 | Dec 30, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to write AppleScripts more efficiently through the use of handlers. Learn how to modularize your scripts, making them more expandable, easier to update, and more. | 10:57 | Nov 25, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to build Service workflows with Automator in Snow Leopard. Become more efficient by creating workflows that process files, folders, and text, and even ones that run AppleScripts! | 9:44 | Oct 27, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to provide a basic level of feedback, such as dialog messages, audio alerts, and speech alerts in AppleScript. Providing feedback is essential to building user friendly scripts. | 11:18 | Sep 29, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie discusses implementing basic error handling techniques in AppleScript. Learn how to catch errors in your scripts and handle them gracefully by taking different courses of action. | 7:52 | Sep 3, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie continues discussing AppleScript's core language, with a focus on adding branching logic and decision making to scripts. Learn how to implement simple, compound, and nested if/then statements. | 9:14 | Jul 22, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie continues discussing AppleScript's core language, which a focus on adding branching logic and decision making to scripts. Learn how to implement simple, compound, and nested if/then statements. | 6:54 | Jun 29, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie continues discussing AppleScript's core language, with a focus on variables. Watch as Ben demonstrates how to use variables to store values from Address Book, and create a new message in Mail. | 9:05 | May 26, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates techniques for getting started writing AppleScripts to control applications in Mac OS X. Learn how to display a Web page in Safari, start the visualizer in iTunes, and more. | 9:22 | Apr 28, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie continues discussing how to navigate application AppleScript dictionaries in Mac OS X. This episode focuses on understanding elements and attributes, also known as classes and properties. | 10:00 | Mar 31, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie begins discussing AppleScripting applications in Mac OS X by exploring how to open and navigate application AppleScript dictionaries. Ben reviews both application commands and parameters. | 7:47 | Mar 17, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie provides an introduction to the primary AppleScript components in Mac OS X, including the AppleScript Utility, Folder Actions Setup application, example scripts, and Script Editor. | 9:06 | Mar 3, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to extend the power of Automator with third-party actions, allowing you to build Web photo galleries, a birthday calendar in iCal, a photo contacts sheet in InDesign, and more. | 8:48 | Feb 17, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to create a simple looping Automator workflow, using the 'Loop' action, to download current weather satellite images and use them as your Desktop wallpaper. | 8:39 | Feb 3, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates advanced usage of workflow variables in Automator, for the purpose of storing action results, and referencing them later. Variables are a powerful feature of Automator in Leopard. | 6:04 | Jan 20, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to get started using variables to incorporate dynamic content into Automator workflows. Variables are a powerful feature of Automator in Leopard. | 8:44 | Jan 6, 2009 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to use Automator to perform tasks in Microsoft Entourage 2008, including attaching PDF versions of documents to outgoing messages, and importing attachments into Aperture. | 6:50 | Dec 23, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to use Automator to perform tasks in Microsoft PowerPoint 2008, including converting a presentation to image files for import into iPhoto, and converting to a QuickTime movie. | 7:56 | Dec 9, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to use Automator to perform tasks in Microsoft Excel 2008. Ben shows you a workflow to batch convert Excel workbooks to .csv format and one that builds address labels in Excel. | 7:17 | Nov 25, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to create an Automator workflow that converts Microsoft Word 2008 documents to PDF or HTML format, and uploads them to a Web server via FTP. | 7:33 | Nov 11, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to create an Automator workflow for Aperture that allows you to review specified photos, import approved photos into an Aperture project, and assign metadata to the photos. | 6:24 | Oct 28, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to save Automator workflows as print workflow plug-ins. Once saved, these workflows appear in Mac OS X's print dialog, and can be triggered to process printed PDF documents. | 7:25 | Oct 14, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to save Automator workflows as iCal alarm plug-ins, allowing them to be scheduled to run during downtime, such as at night or while you're away from your desk. | 4:16 | Sep 30, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how QuicKeys, a third-party automation utility, can be used to perform manual events in Mac OS X. QuicKey shortcuts can be run from menus, key commands, and even Automator workflows. | 8:11 | Sep 16, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how iKey, a third-party automation utility, can be used to perform manual events in Mac OS X. iKey shortcuts can be run from menus, key commands, and even larger automated workflows. | 7:03 | Sep 2, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how even the novice Mac user can get started with AppleScript by recording manual events in the Mac OS X Finder, or other recordable application, as a script, and playing them back. | 5:35 | Aug 26, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to use Automator in Leopard to record your manual mouse clicks and keystrokes, and play them back as part of your workflow. Use recording to expand Automator's capabilities. | 7:41 | Aug 6, 2008 | |
By Ben Waldie In this first episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to create a simple image processing workflow using Automator in Mac OS X Leopard. Learn how to create a workflow that manipulates images from directly within the Finder. | 7:09 | Jul 29, 2008 | |
