Automator, am I worthy?

The Slobzilla campus has been 100% Mac since 2005. For most "normal" people who use their computers mostly for email and surfing the web, switching away from Windows to OSX cures enough heartaches to make it worthwhile. For the creative types the iLife suite takes care of modern multimedia needs. It's bundled with every Mac - a nice bonus compared to most crap you'd find on a new windows box. For command line type powernerds there is the terminal whence insane computer madness is possible. Someday, I'd like to walk among the powernerds writing applescripts that anticipate my every want and desire or whatever it is they do. To that end I bought a copy of AppleScript 1-2-3 written by an AppleScript deity Sal Soghoian but that's way down the road.

Having switched to Mac is to have merged on the Apple Superhighway to nirvana where the signs are written in AppleScript. Automator is a rest stop somewhere along the way. It is a drag and drop workflow management tool written in AppleScript and Cocoa. You gain access to the crazy Unix-like power and the beauty of the Mac Graphical User Interface. Say you create a lot of short video clips with your Canon PowerShot G9 (hey, what a coincidence, me too!) and you want to put them on your website. Maybe you have a MobileMe account use iWeb to maintain a website as is your Jobs-given right to do. Well, when you import those clips into iPhoto don't just drag them over to iWeb right away. The G9 gives them to you as AVI files and, while iPhoto can handle them and iWeb will take them off your hands, Safari will choke on them when you try to look at your finished site. Sure, you can get a Safari plugin to help, but why bother?

Enter Automator. Batch processing all of those clips from AVI to m4v files is something Automator does well in a few simple steps. First, find "Movies" in the Automator library. Click on that and all of the pre-installed actions designed to deal with video are isolated. Next, find Ask for Movies among the actions and drag it to the window furthest to the right. Find Export Movies and drag that, too. Notice how they interlock? Workflow, baby. We can make this contraption work for us, now. At the Ask for Movies prompt type avi and hit the Run button at the top right corner. Another window should pop up with the search results. Select any or all of the files, hit the choose button, take a sip of your Mojito and watch your handiwork. The files are automatically converted into m4v files and go wherever you sent them (probably the Movies folder). Feel free to use those on your iWeb page knowing that they'll play nicely when you look at your masterpiece later.

Congratulations, you're finding value in the 'Apple Premium' at which the Windows users turn up their noses. Of course, they don't accomplish much with their computers and they are very rarely happy but they have that extra few hundred bucks they saved on their machine. Good on 'em, they can use it for virus protection software...