This weeks Automator tip of the week focuses on quickly and easily converting the format of your Word documents to PDF by creating a workflow and saving it as a Finder Plugin.

To create an Automator workflow that will take your selected Word documents in a Finder window and convert them to PDF add the following actions:

1. Get Selected Finder Items - This will tell the automator task to grab all the items you’ve selected in Finder
2. Copy Finder Items - This will allow you to backup the items before you perform any action on them.
3. Convert Format of Word Document - Select Portable Document Format (PDF)

Save The Workflow as a Plugin

With these three action items you have everything you need to quickly convert word documents. To make it even easier lets save Automator workflow as a Finder plugin.

1. Select File
2. Select Save as Plugin
3. Name the plugin and Select Plugin for: Finder.

Test Out The New Finder Plugin

I named the plugin Word2PDF and I’m now ready to test our new Finder plugin:

1. Open a Finder Window and navigate to a folder that contains word documents
2. Select the word documents and right click (command + click)
3. Select More, then Automator, and then Word2PDF (Or whatever you named your Finder plugin

Your computer will then automatically convert the Word files to PDF.

This weeks Automator Tip of the Week is small but useful: Convert Movie to iPod Format.

While there are a number of different movie file formats that work great on your Apple computer not all formats work well with your new iPods. This Automator task makes converting all your movie files to an iPod friendly format easy.

To convert your Movie files to an iPod ready format add these two automator steps:

1. Find Finder Times - Do a search to select your movie files that are not yet in iPod friendly formats
2. Export Movies - This allows you to export your movies an iPod format

Once Automator has found the movie files, it will open them one at a time and convert them to an iPod format that you can quickly sync with your iPod and take them on the go.

Need some help with Automating a task? Let us know!

We’ve mentioned previously how wonderful the new Automator is and have decided that to feature a weekly workflow that may make some of your tasks easier.

The Automator Tip of the Week is Picture File Conversion.

It is amazing the number of different picture file formats for the modern computer. Many people use jpegs but at the same time tiffs are still common amongst Mac users.

Additionally, web picture formats include gif, png, and many others. But amongst all these different file formats you may find yourself in need of a way to quickly convert pictures from one format to another. Opening each picture and saving it as a different format can be very time consuming. Unless, of course, you setup an automator task to do the work for you.

Change Picture File Type With Automator

The following Automator steps will help you batch convert the file extension of your pictures. For a point of reference I’ll reference this as if you were changing png images to jpeg:

1. Find Finder Items - Do a search to select all the .png images you want to transfer to jpeg
2. Get Selected Finder Items
3. Copy Finder Items - This will make sure you keep an original copy of all your .png images should anything go wrong.
4. Change Type of Images - select the image type you’d like to change to.

Run this automator process and you’ll be set with a backup copy of your images and the new images in your desired file format. The process that use to take you forever was completed in seconds.

If you need any help with an Automator process please let us know by leaving a comment.

Have you ever been in a meeting and realized that you had forgotten to bring the latest version of a file with you, been out on the town when you remembered you’d left your computer on and the power bill has just been unbearable lately, or forgotten when your mother-in-laws birthday was and needed to know fast?

Never fear, Now you can use Twitter to have your mac send you the important file, turn off your computer to keep your power bill low, and send your phone the date of your Mother in Law’s birthday.

With some initial setup you can have your Mac ready to provide you with the information you need while away from the computer and on the go. To get started we’ll need a Twitter account.

Getting Started

Twitter is a social networking site that provides:

A service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twitter allows users to post short messages on the web, through email, or with SMS txt messages that will be delivered to their friends via email, txt messages, or rss feeds.

Additionally, twitter’s communication network will allow you to send instructions to your Mac.

To be able to control your Mac with Twitter you’ll need to follow these steps:

1. Setup an account at twitter.com. Follow the onscreen instructions and be sure to enter the email address you have setup with Mail on your Mac.
2. Create preset tasks in Automator that can perform actions that you may need your Mac to do when you’re away from your computer. Save the Automator actions as an app.
3. Create an Apple Script that will launch the application you just created
4. Setup rules in Mail to execute the created Apple Script when certain new messages or RSS feed updates are received from Twitter.

To help make this process easier for you to setup on your own Mac, I’ll walk the process to control your Mac with Twitter and use a fun automator task that takes a picture using Photo Booth and sends it in an email.

Creating a Task in Automator: Take a Picture

Before you create a task in Automator be sure that you’ve setup your Twitter account. Next open Automator from your Applications folder and add these steps to your workflow to tell your Mac to take a picture and send it to your email address:

1. Hide All Applications - This will hide any open application on your system and make sure no open windows distract from the rest of the workflow
2. Launch Application - Photo Booth
3. Watch Me Do - The best way to add this part of the workflow is to open Photo Booth, click the Record button in Automator, select Photo Booth and then press the keyboard shortcut that will have Photo Booth take a picture (command + T).
4. Pause - Set this to 7 seconds so that Photo Booth has enough time to take and save the picture
5. Quit Application - Photo Booth
6. Find Finder Items - Set the Where to Pictures, the Whose should include Kind (is Image), date created (is today), extension (is equal to jpg), and name (contains Photo). These filters will tell Automator to find the all the photo booth pictures taken that day including the one just taken.
7. New Mail Message - be sure to add the email address you’d like the pictures sent to, the subject and anything in the message you’d like to include.
8. Pause - Set this to 3 seconds so Mail can add the photo files to the email message
9. Send Outgoing Messages - Sends the mail and pictures

You can test the workflow to ensure that its working properly by clicking the Run option in Automator. This should email out the photos its just taken in Photo Booth.

Now that we have created the workflow we’d like our Mac to follow we need to save it as an application so that it can be executed in the future. I personally have created a folder in Applications directory that I store my automated applications in and saved this app as TwitterPhoto.app.

Creating A Script to Launch an Application

With the application created and saved the next item we need to setup is the Apple Script that will launch the application. If you’ve never created an Apple Script before don’t worry, this will be the easiest script you’ve ever created.

1. To keep things simple, close your other applications and open Finder to the folder you’ve saved your TwitterPhoto application in
2. Open Script Editor - Fastest Way to find it is through Spotlight
3. Click Record
4. Select TwitterPhoto.app in Finder - You should see Script Editor automatically add text to its window. Click Stop
5. Save the Script

Congrats, you’ve just created a script that will launch the application we just created in Automator. But there is still some work to do before we can test out Twitter’s control over our Mac.

Setting up Mail Rules

The last aspect of setting up your Mac so that you can control it through twitter is configuring Mail. Once you have Mail opened you can either use email messages from Twitter to tell your Mac to execute tasks, or you can add your twitter RSS feed to your Mail application.

With Mail setup to receive information from Twitter, you’re ready to establish Rules in Mail that will launch your TwitterPhoto script and thus your application.

To setup a Rule that will execute a script when a certain command is sent from Twitter to Mail:

1. In Mail, Click Mail on the menu bar and then Preference
2. Select the Rules Tab and click Add Rule
3. Enter a Name for the rule and then be sure that All conditions must be met for this rule
4. Add the following conditions: Message Content Contains - Twitter; Message Content Contains - Take Picture; Message Type is RSS (Select Mail if you’re going to use the Mail Messages from Twitter); From Contains [enter twitter delivery email address here] (This is only needed if you are using Mail instead of RSS)
5. Add the following actions: Run AppleScript [Select the script we created earlier]

Click Ok and apply the rule. The Message Contents of “Twitter” and “Take Picture” in the rule are the key words that we’re telling your Mac to look for.

When we send those words through Twitter it will know to run the script that will take the picture of the person at the desk and send it in an email.

Control Your Mac With Twitter

Now that your Mac is setup to receive instructions from Twitter you should be ready to send your first instruction. Either from Twitter.com or if you’ve already setup your cell phone with Twitter, send a message that includes the following text, “Twitter Take Picture”.

Once the message is sent through twitter you will receive an email that should trigger the rule we created and cause your Mac to take a picture using Photo Booth. If you setup the rule with RSS feed you may need to manually update the feed for it to get the new instruction.

If all has gone well, you will have an email with a picture of you looking amazed at the power of your Mac and the convenience using Twitter may bring to your life.

Conclusion

You can follow these same steps but customize the Automator workflow to instruct your Mac on different actions you’d like it to run while you’re away.

Be sure to create a separate script and a rule for each process you’d like your Mac to run when it receives instructions from you via Twitter.

What Automator tasks will you create to use with Twitter?

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Over the past few years RSS feeds have been transforming the web. Automater on OSX 10.5 allows you to transform RSS feeds from text to your own audio files or podcasts that you can take with you on your iPod.

RSS FEEDS TO AUDIO FILES

To transform your favorite RSS feeds into audio files open Automator in OS X 10.5 and add the following steps:

1. Get Specified URLS (Add the URL of the RSS Feed you want to convert to an audio File)
2. Get Feeds from URLS (This extracts the actual feed from the URL)
3. Get Text from Articles (This step pulls out the text from your RSS feeds and saves it to a text file)
4. Text to Audio File (Have OSX read your new text file and save it to an audio file. Be sure to select the voice of the file, I suggest Alex, and where you want to save it)

If you’d like to import the new audio file into iTunes you can add the step: Import Files into iTunes.

From here you can take your favorite RSS feeds on the go with you. Listen to the articles at your convenience.

Try it out with the maciverse.com RSS Feed.

For those of you that like things the easy way, you can download the Automator workflow here.