Total Leopard Superguide ebook
Macworld.com
http://www.macworld.com/superguide/leopard/
$12.95 downloadable ebook PDF
$15.00 PDF on CD-ROM via mail
$24.95 printed
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has been out long enough for various help books to hit the stores. My current favorite tome is David Pogue’s Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual.
Various web sites have been filling cyberspace with Leopard hints, tips and tricks.
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If you haven’t noticed yet, each of Apple’s main creative suite applications including iMovie, iDVD, Address Book, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and now, Mail’s Stationery feature, includes a photo browser whereby you can access photos stored and managed in your iPhoto and Aperture libraries. This means that if you’re sending an email, creating a DVD slide show, editing a video movie, creating a postcard or newsletter letter layout in Pages, or putting together a spreadsheet in which you need photos or images, you can now access your images directly from the program you’re working in.
I recently blogged about a missing feature from iPhoto which lets you burn a CD of photos that is not in iPhoto format, but instead a CD of JPG images that any computer can read and that you could take to the store for developing in a photo machine. Right after I posted that blog, I discovered a way to create an Automator action to do this for you.
I am not an Automator expert. In fact, this might be the second time I’ve used Automator. However, the process to create this Automator application is a piece of cake. Follow the steps in the movie below:
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Say you’re working on a long-term project in which you’re creating and saving a number of different files over time, and you want to make sure you have those files copied to a back up source after you’ve saved them to a specified folder. Well, if you don’t already have a backup system in place to do this, you can create backup folder in less than ten minutes by following the steps below. This workflow will instantly backup items you save or put into a specified folder.
1. Open up Automator (in your Applications folder.) A new action workflow window will open up.
2. Click on the Finder actions located in the Applications folder (left column) of Automator. Next, click on the Copy Finder Items action in the middle column.
If you regularly change your desktop images for particular purposes, you probably already know how to control click on your desktop and select Change Desktop Background to get the task done. But why go through that process when you can use an Automator action to change to your favorite or most used desktop backgrounds in one simple click.
For example, because I work with color adjusting photo files a lot I often keep my desktop background to a simple gray solid color. But when using my laptop with clients, I like to change my desktop to something more interesting. So in order to change my desktop images, I now click on one of four Automator actions that I created using Apple’s AppleScript-like program, Automator.
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Here’s a quick little Automator action you can put together if you want a way to automatically create a new folder that gathers a batch of selected files you’re selected in your Finder, most preferably on your desktop. I could easily post the action for you to download, but by creating it yourself you’ll discover several other similar Finder actions in Automator that might save you time.
1. Open Automator and select Finder on the far left column. In the Action column, find New Folder and drag it into Workflow window.
If you’re always looking for ways to get your computer to work for you instead of making you work harder, Tiger’s Automator program may provide some solutions.
Automator is basically AppleScript for the rest of us. With this program you don’t need to know special coded language to boss your computer around. If you want to, for example, rename, resize, or email a set of photo files, an Automator workflow can it for you. Taking a look into Automator you’ll find a batch of pre-installed actions and workflows to get you up and going. There’s Actions for every iLife program, TextEdit, Font, and the Finder.
Apple also provides Automator 101 tutorial that introduces you to the familiar select, drag and drop actions of the program. And Automator World provides a growing collection of pre-built, free Action downloads for various applications and actions.
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