Screencast: Automator
Automator is one of the extras in OS X that is a real gem. It has saved me lots of time and has also increased my productivity especially with the workflow of several projects I am working on. Automator can be as basic or advanced as you want it, but this screencast starts out with two basic automator workflows or actions that can be put together quickly.
The first action I put together was a birthday greeting that gathers all of the upcoming months birthdays from my address book and then sends the email addresses to mail with a greeting that can be personalized with a message and image. It works like a charm and I'll probably be using it from now on, and I'll most likely add on an action to add those birthdays into my iCal and set up alarms to remind me of the upcoming birthdays.
The second action is an image resizer. If you're a blogger or have gone through the task of uploading digital photos, you probably know it's a good idea to resize the images you upload to the web. Even my 3.2 megapixel digital camera outputs giant-sized photos in terms of pixels and I used to open each photo I was going to upload to my webserver/flickr/blog in Photoshop and resize them to about half the size. This process also made the uploading faster because the file size is reduced quite a bit.
I'm happy to say that I no longer go through that process thanks to the action I show you in this screencast. One thing I may add on to this action is an option to upload to image shack or my webserver through FTP. I'll most likely cover extending the current actions in future screencasts as well as get into some advanced actions. If you have automator, watch the screencast and then go play with it and see what you can do with the different applications you have.
Note: The audio was recorded a little low so you may want to turn up your volume.
Download a 640x480 high quality version of this screencast
