The Future of Deliveries Deliveries began as a hobby—it was first released as a Dashboard widget named “Apple…
New Mac OS X Section and Automator Actions
As an avid Mac user for 18 years and counting, I figure it’s time I added a Mac OS X section to my journal. I’ve also added a Mac Goodies area to the site, featuring some Automator actions I’ve just created. For the unfamiliar, Automator is a new tool in Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. Automator is similar to the much older AppleScript technology in that it makes repetitive tasks easier. But unlike AppleScript, it’s easy for anyone to use. You simply piece together pre-made actions into a workflow, and set various options for each.
You can also use AppleScript to create Automator actions, which is what I’ve done here. A little bit of time spent updating old scripts makes them much more flexible, and easier to use.
Make Names Web-Friendly takes the selected files and changes their names to make them friendlier for online use. “My Favorite Photo.JPG”, for example, is converted to “my_favorite_photo.jpg”. Uppercase is converted to lowercase; spaces and most special characters are converted to underscores. Successive underscores are removed.
Change Extensions simply changes the file extensions of the selected files. A dialog box will ask you for the new extension. This one comes in handy in web development too… If you need to convert a bunch of .html files to .php, for example.
Add to Folder is a bit different. It takes the selected files and moves them to a new folder. The trick is that duplicates are handled much differently than normal: if there is already a file with the same name, a number (in parenthesis) is added to the end of the file name. The result is that all the files are combined into one folder, and none of them are deleted.
One of the great features of Automator is that you can create plug-ins for various applications, including the Finder. These actions are ideal used as Finder plug-ins, as you can simply select a group of files, control-click, and choose an action from the Automator menu. I hope you find them useful, and feedback is welcome!
View more
Mac
An update on our apps It’s been a while since we shared an update on everything we’re working on. With iOS 15…
Upcoming changes to Deliveries Deliveries 9.2 will be available soon, and we wanted to let you know about some changes…
Deliveries 9 will arrive September 30 Deliveries 9 will be available this Wednesday, September 30, for iPhone, iPad, Apple…
Comments
This entry has one comment.
Buzz wrote on May 23, 2005:
I read all the time, I just never comment because I never comment on anything I read. Don’t think your work isn’t appreciated, though!