We often talk about ways to enhance your Mac experience by using automated actions. Additionally, many Maciverse readers have created or continue to create websites with iWeb. With that in mind, I suggest that all iWeb users download and install the iWeb Action Pack for Automator.
With the iWeb Action Pack for Automator you’ll be able to quickly and easily add photos and video to your iWeb site. The action pack includes:
- Add Images to Blog
- Add Movie Pages
- Add Movies to Blog
- Create Photo Album
- Get Image URL for photos on Page
Each of these will take the media passed into it and create a blog page or normal page with the corresponding information. If you’re a big photo blogger, video blogger, or just want to make it faster and easier to update information on your website, the iWeb Action Pack for Automator is for you.
Although Finder, OS X file management application, has many built in features and capabilities it can be enhanced in many ways.
We’ve mentioned previously how Automator can help you quickly convert files to different formats and show hidden files in Finder. Today’s tip will help you quickly upload files to FTP locations from within finder.
Before we can get started on the application we’ll need to download and install an FTP Plugin automator task from “Upload to FTP”
To create a Finder Plugin to make file uploads to FTP sites quick and easy, follow these steps:
- Open Automator and select a custom workflow
- Add the “Get Selected Finder Items” to your workflow
- Add the recently download “Upload to FTP” automator workflow
- Update the FTP Details with information about your FTP Site
- Save your workflow as a Finder Plugin
If prompted, to allow a “perl” application to accept incoming network connection, feel free to allow it.
Now that you’ve created your workflow, you should be able to select a file in finder, right or command click a file, select More, then Automator, and the plugin that you created with your Automator workflow.
After selecting the plugin OS X should take the file and upload it to your FTP site. If you view the FTP site from another application the files should be added to the directory detailed in your Upload to FTP portion of your recently created plugin.
If you’ve ever wanted to quickly browse your iPhoto library to drag and drop photos to another application but wanted to do so with out opening iPhoto itself… than this Automator tip is for you.
To create an iPhoto Library browser that can be accessed system wide:
- Open Automator
- Select Photos from your Action Library
- Drag Action – Ask for Photos to your workflow
Now that you’ve created your automator workflow you need to setup your system so that you can quickly access the iPhoto Library Browser throughout OS X.
- Save your workflow as plug-in (Save As Plugin-in) as a plugin for Script Menu
- Open AppleScript Utility from your Applications folder
- Check “Show Script Menu in Menu Bar” – This will add a Script icon to your menu bar that you can access saved scripts from
Now that you’ve created the iPhoto Library Browser script and added the Script Menu to your menu bar you can quickly and easily open your iPhoto library any time you need to access pictures but without having to open iPhoto itself.
From here you can find your pictures and drag and drop them to the location or application of your choice.
*Note – Selecting the pictures and clicking the Choose button will do nothing – you must drag and drop the photos to the location or Application of your choice. *
- Tip found @ macosxhints.com
The Automator tip of the week walks you through one way to extract the contact information from Address book and put it into a format that you can upload to Gmail.
Gmail accepts csv files for importing contacts. Unfortunately Address Book does not export directly to csv. Why it doesn’t is a puzzle in it self, but thankfully we can get the same results through Automator with the use of some Microsoft Office actions.
To create a csv file Automator of your contacts in Address Book add the following actions to a workflow:
- Find People in Address Book, Set Whose to Name, is not equal to, and then use * in the input field – This tells automator to look through all the names in your address book and return everyone that doesn’t have a * in their name.
- Get Contact Information, Export Format: Spreadsheet (tabs) – This gathers all the information about each contact and puts it into a standard format we can work with.
- New Text File – I named it contacts.txt and saved it to my desktop – This will write the information from address book to a text file
- Import Text Files to Excel Workbook – Select New Workbook and mark the delimiters as Tab
- Save Excel Workbooks – Save Workbooks as contacts, on the desktop and select CSV(Comma Delimited) as the format
Import Address Book CSV File to Gmail
If everything was constructed correctly you should be able to run the workflow and 2 files will be written to your desktop. From here we can import our contacts.csv file into Gmail.
To import your contacts.csv to gmail:
- Login to Gmail
- Click Contacts
- Click Import
- Choose your contacts.csv file and click Import
- Follow the final instructions from Gmail and verify your contacts imported correctly
Now that we’ve showed how to complete this process with Automator, there is also an application – A to G that was built do extract Address Book Contacts and place them in a CSV file.
Importing Contacts from Gmail into Address Book is a bit easier.
In my recent efforts to get apache2 and mysql up and running on my iMac I often needed to view the hidden files in Finder. I was lucky enough to stumble across a hint that showed me exactly the commands I needed to run in terminal to view all the hidden files in Finder.
After viewing and hiding these files over and over again I realized that this would be a perfect plugin for Finder. I launched automator and found the 1 action item I needed to show and hide files in finder.
I selected “Run Shell Script” from the Utilities library and dragged it over to my workflow. I added the following text to the workflow:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
Once the code was included in the step, I saved the workflow as a Finder plugin: ShowHidden. Now to view the hidden files in finder, I simply right click (command + click) in Finder, select More, Automator, and then ShowHidden. Finder closes and then re-opens with all the hidden files and folders viewable.
To hide the files again, I created another workflow with the same “Run Shell Script” action and entered in this text:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder
I saved it as a Finder plugin, HideHidden. To hide the files and folders again, righ click (command + click) in Finder, select More, Automator, and then HideHidden. Finder will close and re-open with the files and folders hidden again.
Now there is no need to open Terminal to view OS X hidden files in Finder.
