I realize you can open a PDF, drag another PDF into the Preview window, and combine in that fashion, but in my experience, there’ve been issues with cross-platform compatibility when using this method. I turned to Automator, and within a few minutes, had a pretty simple and effective way to solve the problem.

1. I decided to create a Service rather than a standalone application or workflow, so it would be accessible from anywhere I may end up in the Finder, at any time.



2. Since PDFs were my focus, I set the service to target them while browsing from the Finder. You can obviously play around with these settings to do different things, depending on your needs.



3. The first action to drag into the editor is the heavy lifter here, and is very clearly named: “Combine PDF Pages.” I’d prefer they append to one another rather than shuffle them together.



4. At this point, I thought I was done, but when I would run the Service against a couple of PDF files, I had no idea where the resulting file ended up. For some reason, it wasn’t in the clipboard, but rather, was in some non-accessible directory of OS X. So added the “Move Finder Items” command into the editor, and the result was just what I wanted.



5. Finally, select the files in the Finder, right click, and choose your newly-created Service from the Services submenu. The resulting PDF shows up as some gibberish file name, right on the desktop.

Automator is a flexible tool, and can be made to do so many of the random tasks that we find need for on a daily basis. Hopefully, this simple solution will kickstart the process of creating your own custom workflows, as well.

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For my setup, I use an older Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT paired with an EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens and a monopod. I also use a MacBook Pro to handle image processing and file uploading (though you don’t necessarily need that much power). The software I use is a simple mix of the stock Canon EOS Utility (PDF), Apple’s built-in Automator, and the Dropbox Client for Mac.

Through Canon’s EOS Utility, the naming convention used for saving the images in the transferred to the folder on the Mac is configurable.

This technique saves considerable time, considering the alternative would be syncing the images at pre-determined intervals and manually moving files around on my file system. Even though I share a Dropbox photo folder, I typically don’t specify that location as the “Destination Folder” that Canon’s EOS Utility uses to save files to. Instead, I save files from the camera to another folder that I set up in Automator as an Action Folder. This intermediary Action Folder resizes the images and copies them to the Dropbox folder for instant upload to a shared folder in my Dropbox account. When Canon’s EOS Utility offloads the images from the camera to this folder, the workflow I created (detailed below) will execute.

To create this Folder Action, from the Applications folder in the Finder, launch Automator and select the “Folder Action” template. Folder actions are workflows that are associated with a folder. Any items dropped into that folder will cause the workflow to run. Once the folder action has been created, set the “Folder Action receives files and folders added to” as the location that the Canon EOS Utility is offloading the images to. This will start the process.

Next, add the following Actions to the Folder Action:

1. From the Library, select a “Copy Finder Items” action located within Files & Folders.
2. Set the “To” to some temporary location that images will be resized within. Do not use the Dropbox folder location in this step, as the full size images will be copied and then resized.
3. From the Library, select a “Scale Images” action located within Photos.
4. Set the “To Size (pixels)” to 1024.
5. From the Library, select the ”Add Text to Finder Item names” action located within Photos.
6. Set “Add Text” to _1024x682 “after name.” This will add a suffix to the end of the file name indicating that the file has been resized.
7. From the Library, select another “Copy Finder Items” action located within Files & Folders.
8. Set the “To” to the local Dropbox location that images will be uploaded from.

Each time you press the silver shutter release on the Digital SLR, the resulting image file will automatically be transferred to the Mac, resized, renamed and uploaded to the Internet!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I used to use my Mac at my day job. However, a combination of not-so-subtle hints from our Information Security folks as well as the general pain in the posterior of managing a SharePoint site on the Mac forced me back to a PC. Frankly, for what I do, my little Dell ultraportable is just fine.

A project recently hit my desk, though, where using the Mac became the best choice for me. We’re shuttering a data center and moving about 300 servers to new locations. It became my task to update all of our documentation to reflect the servers new homes.

After poking around with some lack-luster search tools in SharePoint and a conference with our admins, I learned there wasn’t an automated way to feed a list of servers into SharePoint’s search engine and have it spit out a list of documents each server is in.

With SP2 for Office 2008, Microsoft introduced a new Document Connection tool, which allows Office 2008 to connect to SharePoint sites very easily. Figuring this tool might be beneficial to my chore, I fired it up.

Unfortunately, I quickly learned that I can’t actually search the contents of documents on the site; I can only search on the name of the document. No worries. Part of our “in case of emergency” recovery plan is the entire site is exported to a share on our file server.

This was a great task for Automator. I quickly created a little search tool that would copy the selected text (server name) to a Text Edit document, and then append to that document the names of all the documents that contained that server. A little find-and-replacing to clean up the document, I soon had a nice Excel sheet with the list of documents I needed to edit.

Finding the actual documents through SharePoint’s web portal would be a hassle, though. I could find them on the master list, or depending on how they are tagged, but it sure would be nice if I had a tool where I could quickly type in the document name and open it in Word. Oh, wait, I do: the newly-released Document Connection tool. It worked perfectly. Since I had the list of document titles, it was amazingly easy to find the document I needed and edit it.

While the tool made my life easier, there are a few things I’d like to see in future releases. All of our documents need to be approved before people can see them. There was no way to approve the changes via the tool; I still had to go to the web interface to do this. It wasn’t the end of the world, since the approval process actually works well on non-IE browsers.

The real hassle, though, was assigning the metatags we use. Each document needs to have two tags assigned to it that “file” the document in their correct bins — these are what the product is and what market it belongs to. These are assigned from a pre-defined list, and when you go to the SharePoint site, there are pulldowns you can choose the product and market groups. The pulldowns to assign a newly-uploaded document its proper tagging do not work on non-IE browsers, so it’d be nice to have a way I could assign those via the tool as well.

What has your experience been with Microsoft’s Document Connection tool?

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Google’s Chrome browser is fast, small, and “nearly” perfect. Using the same Webkit rendering engine as Safari, and its own custom V8 javascript engine, Chrome has been blowing away the competition on Windows for over a year. Google is finally nearing a release for the Mac, but since the browser is open source, you can get almost everything from Chrome in the Chromium Nightlies. These builds are separate from the official Google Chrome developers preview, they are in-development versions of Chrome, and are updated almost every night.

I’ve been using the Chromium builds off and on for months, and have recently switched back to it as my primary browser. Chromium reminds me of when Firefox first spun off of Mozilla. It was then, as Chromium is now, small, bare-bones, devoid of feature bloat, and fast.

Unfortunately. the Nightlies are not the easiest thing in the world to find, and Chromium doesn’t update itself when a new build is available. So, I used a little Automator and shell script action to build this tiny app that will download the latest version of Chromium to your Downloads folder. If you’ve got Growl installed it will also send Growl an alert that it is finished, but that’s it. That’s all it does, very simple, nothing fancy.

You can download the “ChromeUp” Automator application here (45kb, ZIP).

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It realizes it by allowing you to create your own Services. Unless you really needed to delve into the Services menu (located under the Application menu) you’re likely to never even know it’s there — when I asked a friend to screenshot her Leopard Services menu for this article, she replied “what menu?” That menu was, to put it gently, a bleeping mess. Every service showed up, even ones that couldn’t be used with program or you had little or no use for. Here’s what it looks like in Leopard.

In Snow Leopard, the Services menu now only displays actions that can be handled by that program. You can also choose what services show up, so if there’s one you never use, you can hide it. Services are also contextual and will show up when you right-click on an actionable item like text in Pages or a file in Finder. If you click on a file in the Finder, and then the gear icon in the toolbar, you can also see what actions apply to that file.

In Leopard, I could create a Finder or iCal action, but creating workflows that would work in any application wasn’t very user friendly. You might be able to create an AppleScript, or if you’re a Quicksilver junkie you could create an action for it, but Snow Leopard really lets the average user create tools to enhance productivity. Now that Automator can create Services, it’s really becoming a powerful tool. Also, in Snow Leopard, Automator can now use data detectors, so if you select an address, you can use Automator to write an action that’ll look it up in Google Maps.

I’m going to show you a few services I created today while learning the new tools — as well as a few I got from macosxautomation.com. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t do these in 10.5, but how slick and easy it now is in 10.6 is amazing. I can easily see the Services menu now acting as a sort of Macro Central to it make it easy to find my actions.

Emailing Specific Files to Specific People

I’m in a weekly D&D group and we use Wizard’s Character Builder to manage our characters (sadly, it’s Windows-only, ensuring I’ll be a Parallels customer for the foreseeable future). Kelsey, our GM, wants a copy and I’ll send a copy to the guy that hosts the game in case I forget to print them out. I created the service in the screenshot below to automatically attach my characters to a mail message and send them off. Now, regardless of what program I’m in, I can just choose the service I created and email them. I’ve got a few services like this created to email files to frequent recipients.

Lookup Text On Wikipedia

If you’re typing away and you want to look up text on Wikipedia, download the Internet Services action from macosxautomation.com. This will bring up a pop-up window that’ll let you quickly search Wikipedia. In what’s likely an “I’m missing something obvious moment,” I can’t seem to get the action to work from within Safari. While we’re on the subject of Safari, that same Internet Services action lets you create a webpage popup of any page. By default, it presents itself as an iPhone, so you get a small, mobile optimized pop up. This is handy if there’s any web sites you frequently consult.

Browse Your iPhoto Library

This is another one I downloaded from macosxautomation.com. One of the features I love in iWork is being able to browse my iPhoto library and insert a photo into my document. Now, with the Browse Library service, I can have that same functionality in any program.

Weird Glitches and Problems

So far in my admittedly small data sample, I’ve only run into a few issues. I’ve already talked about the Wiki lookup not working in Safari, but I’ve also noticed Automator doesn’t see text selected in Microsoft Word 2008 as “selected text” — no services other than the general services show up in Word (I didn’t try out the rest of the suite). What’s interesting is there are a ton of Office-related actions included in Automator. I’ve had an e-mail discussion with Microsoft’s Mac BU about this and they’re looking into it.

Resources

MacBreak Video has a great session with Sal Saghoian, the AppleScript Product Manager at Apple. I’m constantly amazed at how Sal’s laid-back presentation style actually makes what could be a dry topic easy to follow. He’ll show you some great video examples of what the new Automator can do.

I’ve mentioned macosxautomation.com multiple times, and I’m mentioning it again. This site is promising to be my one-stop shop as I continue to learn about Automator.

The changes in Automator look fantastic. Until now, my Automator usage has been very situational. In Snow Leopard, I’m looking forward to creating workflows I’ll be using daily.

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The real power of OS X lies in all of the hidden gems beneath what you see at first glance. Technologies like Expose, Spaces, Stacks, Spotlight and others help users tap the power of their Mac, while keeping the experience sleek and elegant. Aptonic’s Dropzone, a third-party application designed to further simplify your Mac experience, fits into this group perfectly and naturally.

It’s Like an Intern for Your Dock

Dropzone is an application that resides in your Dock like any other app. The power of Dropzone comes into play when you begin dragging files onto its icon. Similar to the appearance of a Stack, Dropzone will expand giving you options of what to do with the file or files you’ve selected. Think of it like Automator for your Dock.

For example, if I have a handful of files selected, and drag them onto my Dropzone icon, I am presented with a series of choices, one of which is “Zip files and email.” As simple as it sounds, dragging the files onto this icon zips the files automatically and attaches them to a new email message inside of Mail. Gone are the days of right-clicking to compress the files, attaching that to an email and then deleting the zip file when I’m done.

Another “destination” included is the ability to install applications quickly by dragging a DMG onto the “Install Application” destination. Behind the scenes, your Mac will mount the DMG file, locate the application inside, copy it to your Applications folder and launch it, unmount the DMG and move the DMG file to the trash.

Other destinations include quick access to uploading images to Flickr (including copying the image URL to your clipboard when its done) or upload files to your FTP server. Want those files zipped before upload? No problem. Just hold down the option key as you drag the files onto the icon. It’s quick and simple and really does save time.

I’m the type of Mac user who likes to keep my Dock as simplified as possible, but I do enjoy the ability to be able to drag files onto an application icon and force the file to open in that application. Dropzone allows me to throw applications I use frequently inside of it and then I have the ability to do just that. Compared to attempting the same thing with a stack in Leopard, I only spawn Finder windows.

Taking It Further

Several optional downloads can extend the functionality of Dropzone. There are add-ons to allow you to start your screensaver, mount/unmount firewire drives, and set your computer to sleep, in addition to many others. Dropzone even includes support for popular web services, including the ability to quickly share photos via TwitPic, shorten a dropped URL via the Is.Gd service (and copy it to the clipboard automatically), and quickly share photos and documents on Posterous.

If you are comfortable programming ruby scripts, Dropzone also offers a scripting API to allow you to create your own “destinations” to further extend the application.

If you’d like to try out Dropzone, it’s currently available for Leopard or Snow Leopard users. Aptonic does provide a trial version of the software, and the cost is only $10 to purchase the full version. The trial does limit you to 15 days of use and up to five “destinations” at a time. I spoke with the developers at Aptonic and they informed me that updates through 1.0 will be freely available to users who register, but the $10 price is likely just an introductory price. Download the demo version here.

I’ll be the first to admit, much like Quicksilver or Spaces, once you get used to integrating this app, it really does save you time. If you have tried out Dropzone, let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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Since first appearing in Tiger, Automator has brought programming to the masses in a simple drag and drop interface. An entire ecosystem has sprung up around Automator, using its ability to create and distribute complex workflows and actions, and the ability for developers to provide Automator with actions specific to their application. If you are looking for a way to automate a repetitive task, chances are there may already be an action or workflow built to do what you need.

The best resource, and the first stop on the way to finding the perfect automation solution, is Apple’s own download page. One I found that was immediately useful was the attach2mail action, which gives the Finder a contextual menu to attach the selected Finder items in a new email in Mail. If nothing in the Apple site seems right, Automator.us, Automator World, and Automator Actions each offer collections of user-submitted actions and workflows.

I’d also suggest checking out the excellent packages available from Automator-Actions and Automated Workflows that give you quick access to bundles of actions revolving around certain needs (Productivity, Photoshop, FileMaker, etc.). Automated Workflows also offers a custom workflow development service, so if you truly cannot find what you are looking for, they’ll create it for you!

Finally, as an example of what can be done with Automator, there is the open source project OttoMate, a complete automated web testing system.

Automator may very well be one of the forgotten gems of OS X, but there are still plenty of resources out there to get started with your own personal automation system.

What are some tasks that you use Automator for? Do you use it regularly? What are some other Automator resources you’ve found useful?

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My life is busy (and yes, if you’re wondering, it is all about me), and frequently I tend to rip or download music without taking the time to apply ratings to it. Since ratings are one of the best methods for determining the usefulness of your playlists, neglecting to add that information to your tracks can really handicap the power iTunes offers.

Some pondering of the issue (and a putrid burning smell) led me to come up with a Do It Yourself kind of solution that everyone can institute without spending anything more than a little time. If this sounds like something useful to you, feel free to follow along at home.

Data Dips

First, what kind of information do we want to leverage? For my purposes, there are three scenarios that I like to use to properly keep up with my iTunes library. The resulting Smart Playlists look as follows.

Rate Me
In this case, I’ve added music within the last n amount of time which has yet to be given any rating.

Might Like This
Here I’m reminding myself of recently added music that I may want to rate highly, based on the play count.

Still 5 Stars?
We have all added a song to iTunes at one point, thinking it was the greatest song ever and rated it an enthusiastic 5 stars. Some time later, we may have gotten tired of that song, or just moved on to a new, more refined taste in music. This set of songs have been in the library for a while and have 5 star ratings applied.

Using these smart playlists, we can fairly successfully identify music that most likely needs some attention in the ratings department. In fact, we could marry the Rate Me and Might Like This playlists to give us an even more targeted selection of tracks. For me it’s more complete to use the two lists separately from one another.

On the Still 5 Stars playlist, since it’s pulling randomly from the library, I prefer to mark the songs I’ve reviewed so they don’t repeatedly come up in the randomized playlist. To do this, I’m adding ‘automator’ to the comment category, as it’s sort of a ‘taggable’ field.

Otto-matic

If the above seems too manual for your tastes, let’s use Automator to do the work for us. (Otto is the name of the robot on the Automator icon, just in case you didn’t know.) Downloading this file will give you a starting point in Automator that looks like the screenshot below. This workflow file will locate songs in your iTunes library that have been played more than 4 times in the past 2 months. Once it has done so, it applies a 4 star rating and adds the tag ‘automator’ to the comments of each song file affected (for easier review later, if you like). Tweak the parameters as best fits your listening and rating practices.

In Play

So now we have some smart playlists and an also an auto-rating workflow — what to do now? Well let’s handle the workflow first.

From the ‘File’ menu, choose ‘Save as Plug-in’. On the next save dialog screen, name it something helpful, like Auto-Rate and then from the drop down menu, choose iCal Alarm. Switching to iCal, you’ll find a new Automator calendar has been created, and you can schedule your Auto-Rate to run on some recurring basis such as every month. Now you can sit back and let your Mac do the music ratings for you!

Ok, now for the playlists. I wrestled with Automator for a while to try to make a useful solution for popping them up as reminders. Nothing worked to my liking. So I fell back on simply scheduling a regularly recurring item in iCal with a double alarm which pops the name of the event as an on screen message and also opens iTunes. It’s not perfect, but it does get it in front of you.

Last Thoughts

The smart playlist solutions still rely on you to do the legwork, they’re only pulling the relevant songs for your review. The Auto-Rate solution takes your personal time investment out of the equation and does the work for you, which is sort of brilliant. But while the parameters you choose to automatically apply should be right most of the time, there will still be some that you disagree with. A semi-regular spot check can help keep this reigned-in. With this in mind, it might be a good idea to institute one more smart playlist – one that pulls 4 star songs with the comment “automator.”

These practices aren’t going to solve world hunger, or bring the economy back (immediately at least), but they should help you get a better handle on your iTunes music library. At least if you’re as poor at keeping up with it as I tend to be.

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Connect your iPhone (and quit iPhoto, if it comes up) and fire up Image Capture. You will see that it recognizes your device and is ready to serve.

You could just click “Download All” to have your images saved to your “Pictures” folder, but you can do much more with the application. The first thing you should do is bring up the application Preferences and choose a new default option for what happens when you connect any camera to your system (I suggest choosing “No application” as you then have control of what happens when you connect any given image-oriented device).

Bringing up the Options panel lets you change the “delete” behavior upon import, what information gets stored with the image (in both the image and the Finder) and what happens when Image Capture opens with a device connected.

When “Download Some…” is selected, you are given the option to process selected images with custom, optional transformations. “Download All” does just what it says.

If you elect to store information with the photos, the Finder (and Spotlight database) will be nicely populated, too.

While Image Capture can help streamline the retrieval of digital snaps from your iPhone, if you combine it with some interesting folder actions, you may also be able to seriously improve your overall workflow.

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This dialog is a one of Leopard’s new security features called “File Quarantine” and is primarily designed to protect users from trojan horse attacks. Any application that may download file content from the Internet can tag them as being “quarantined” to indicate that the it may be from an untrustworthy source. This is done simply by assigning values to one or more quarantine properties which preserve information about when and where the file come from.

In OS X, the majority of user-space files are opened via Launch Services. When an open event is triggered (i.e. by double-clicking on the file) the operating system checks to see if the file appears to be an application, script, or other executable file type. If that is the case, Launch Services will display an alert asking the user to confirm whether the file is some kind of application. If/once the file is opened, the quarantine properties are automatically cleared by Launch Services if the user has write access to the file.

The Gory Details

You can see this in action if you’re willing to brave the Terminal. Go ahead and download some application from the internet, say Bean 1.0 (the minimalist document editor which released version 1.0 yesterday). Open up a Terminal prompt and type:

xattr -l Downloads/Bean-Install.dmg

xattr is a command that can perform operations on extended file attributes that are normally hidden from the GUI side of OS X.

After running that command – which lists these attributes – you’ll see some very unfriendly output that looks like this (main items we care about have been highlighted:

com.apple.diskimages.recentcksum: i:4803338 on 26E026C0-FD2C-3745-8A89-3F2157D5B176 @ 1206470700 - CRC32:$E2826548
com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms:
0000   62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 A2 01 02 5F 10 31 68 74    bplist00..._.1ht
0010   74 70 3A 2F 2F 77 77 77 2E 62 65 61 6E 2D 6F 73    tp://www.bean-os
0020   78 2E 63 6F 6D 2F 72 65 6C 65 61 73 65 73 2F 42    x.com/releases/B
0030   65 61 6E 2D 49 6E 73 74 61 6C 6C 2E 64 6D 67 5F    ean-Install.dmg_
0040   10 2B 68 74 74 70 3A 2F 2F 6D 61 63 75 70 64 61    .+http://macupda
0050   74 65 2E 63 6F 6D 2F 69 6E 66 6F 2E 70 68 70 2F    te.com/info.php/
0060   69 64 2F 32 34 38 38 31 2F 62 65 61 6E 08 0B 3F    id/24881/bean..?
0070   00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03    ................
0080   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 6D    ...............m

com.apple.quarantine: 0000;47ea606e;Safari;569BD03D-469D-4546-92FF-83C0F3669A07|com.apple.Safari

• “com.apple.diskimages.recentcksum” has the checksum of the disk image which is used in verifying the integrity of the file.
• “com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms” stores the URL where the file was downloaded from.
• “com.apple.quarantine” – however – is the entry that causes Launch Services to generate the confirmation dialog

The only way to prevent this dialog from appearing is to remove this attribute, which can easily be done by doing the following from the Terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Downloads/Bean-Install.dmg

This is not a practical solution as it would be much easier to just click “OK” and be done with the dialog rather than go through this series of command line gyrations.

A More Elegant Solution

If you are determined to bypass this built-in security feature (which I highly caution against) then you may be interested in solution developed by Henrik and available over at The Pug Automatic. It involves an AppleScript that performs recursive “xattr -d‘s” and is then attached to key folders – like “Downloads” – as a Folder Action. Any time files are added to the folder, the script will ensure that all quarantine values are unset, freeing you from having to expend precious energy and human compute cycles to evaluate a small dialog and click “OK”.

The script/action combination works well (I tried it and then removed it), but if you know of another means to accomplish this task (a hidden “defaults” setting, perhaps) or have more questions on File Quarantine (or other Leopard security features), please drop a note in the comments.

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Automating Free Music (mov)
10 mins / 102mb

The ‘Free Music’ part has to do with the fun weekly mixes found at OutOf5.com, nothing shady, so don’t fear the reaper…

Oh, and if the audio is a wee bit quiet, my apologies – I had to use a different mic last night, in a different space than I normally record these things. Hopefully it’s not too bad, but it was a one time circumstance. But as always, feedback is welcome regardless.

UPDATE
Ali’s getting pushy ;) and wanted the Automator Workflows I’ve already created. And here they are….Do your worst!

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