For today’s tip, I’m going to show you how to use Automator to write a very simple backup utility—you’ll be able to compress and copy a given folder with a single mouse click. While not an ideal ...

We spend so much of our workdays doing rather arduous and tedious tasks, especially if you're working on a computer of any kind. Renaming files, converting PDFs; these are the things that can take way ...

We’ll start with a straightforward action, one which will take images from the Finder and resize them when you drop them onto the application icon on the desktop. Launch Automator, either from the ...

I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple’s operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I ...

If you've been manually performing a task on your Mac over and over, you can automate it with Automator and use iCal to schedule when you want the task to run. Apple includes a free copy of Automator ...

It doesn't have to be difficult to make your Mac automatically perform repetitive or tedious tasks for you. Apple's free Automator app on every Mac has a plethora of functions that take one step to ...

Sometimes when working with Automator, you might want a workflow to loop (or go back to the first step and continue to run through the workflow). Automator includes an easy-to-use "Loop" action, and ...

I've talked about getting your Mac to shutdown via an e-mail (or even take a picture from your iSight and e-mail it back to you), but I have received some comments and e-mails about using this script ...

A few weeks ago, while I was preparing my coverage of Apple’s Q2 2013 earnings call, I grew tired of my system to resize and rename images on OS X, so I rebuilt it from scratch using Automator, Name ...

If you stay a lot of time away from your Macbook but you’ve always wanted to control what’s happening to your Mac while you’re not there, this tutorial is aimed at you. Today I’ll teach you how you ...

October 1, 2007 Add as a preferred source on Google Add as a preferred source on Google Mac only: Add a "Back up this folder" item to Finder's context menu with a simple Automator workflow suggested ...