Mac Automation: Useful Automator Scripts for Mac OS X

Mac provides some of the best Automator scripts that allow you to use predefined rules and scripts to generate output for your routine activities. These scripts allow even the users who don’t have a programming background to define some actions depending on a certain workflow on their Mac. This article provides some handy Automator scripts that help you perform useful tasks instantly.

The brief details of the best automation applications for your Mac OS X are presented below.

Dashboarder

It is quite a useful script that allows you to toggle your Dashboard on or off for the purpose of conserving RAM. You can still easily access your widgets.

Maintenance

This script consists of a set of actions taken by Automator for maintaining the health of the Mac. It also includes the useful features of the Verify Preference Files, Repair Permissions, Periodic Cleanup, Clear Cache Files, Force Empty Trash, and many other handy tasks.

iCalBirthdays

This handy little utility allows you to make a birthday calendar in your Mac based on the contacts of your Address Book. It is different from the default calendar of Mac owing to the fact that you can easily set the alarm for each birthday. You can also combine the alarm with other actions such as publishing your .ics files to a Web or a file server.

Save for Web

This application is a great tool for those who love to customize their pictures quite a lot. You can export images in different formats using Adobe Photoshop CS for higher quality images. You can also see the Preview version without having to launch the application. You can also use the additional options that would allow you to resize the images and then sharpen the images after resizing.

Create Clean Archive

This Automator application creates a clean zip format archive that you can easily share with others. The desktop files and Macintosh resource folks will be ignored so that they don’t create any hindrance on other operating systems. Before uploading the files online, you need to use the action “Make Names Web-Friendly” afterward for ensuring that the archive has the file name that is suitable for web.

Batch Rename

It is a wonderful little Automator script that allows you to rename the huge number of files in a folder according to your defined rules. You can set the rules as you wish for naming the photos taken on a trip or your documents for research.

Download URLs as PDF

While surfing the web, you come across many websites that capture your attention and you bookmark them. However, websites keep on changing with time and it is a good idea to copy the link of the website and save it as PDF. You can use it for the future referencing.

This article might prove to be useful for you to get the idea about Automator scripts. You may try some more automation applications for your Mac OS X for increasing your experience with scripts that generate automatic workflow or actions.