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Mac Automator: Awesomely Mostly Obsolete

While installing a new art program, I saw that my Macintosh HD only has about 22 GB of storage left.

"Yeesh," I said, clicking 'Continue', "I need to clean up some files. Not just files, Applications. If I'm not using it, get rid of it."

Then I saw a little robot icon - "Automator". And thought "What the heck is this?"


This video is from 2014, right before the programmer / automator boom. Automator is designed so that your computer does repetitive tasks that you outline in a helpful GUI.




Right: Workflow window.
Left: Actions; What is having the action performed on it?



Kind of like Microsoft Management Console. This first example is more akin to when you scan a lot of things through some company's proprietary software and it asks if you want to name them, and they all end up as "SCAN001", "SCAN002", etc.

Here is giving a naming scheme to mass-imported photos.


There's also a Workflow to encrypt PDFs.




EMPLOYERS: This is me using Mac OSX utilities to automate simple tasks.

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