For today’s tip, I’m going to show you how to use Automator to write a very simple backup utility—you’ll be able to compress and copy a given folder with a single mouse click. While not an ideal ...

I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple’s operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I ...

Automator's great for streamlining some of the repetitive things you do each day on your Mac. With Automator, you can create your own custom plugins for the Services menu, Folder Action workflows that ...

If you stay a lot of time away from your Macbook but you’ve always wanted to control what’s happening to your Mac while you’re not there, this tutorial is aimed at you. Today I’ll teach you how you ...

The Automator application in OS X is a feature that many people use to modify documents in a folder, or perform other routine actions such as synchronizing items in a folder with those in another ...

A few weeks ago, while I was preparing my coverage of Apple’s Q2 2013 earnings call, I grew tired of my system to resize and rename images on OS X, so I rebuilt it from scratch using Automator, Name ...

If you've been manually performing a task on your Mac over and over, you can automate it with Automator and use iCal to schedule when you want the task to run. Apple includes a free copy of Automator ...

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice (and expert) Mac users. Have you every tried to copy and paste text from a PDF into a word processor document like Pages or Microsoft Word? Most of the time ...

Take a look at any of Apple's promotional material for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) and you'll find that a feature that consistently gets a top-billing is Automator. However, I suspect that, if you could ...

When we posted on Friday that iTunes 10 had killed off old Automator workflows, it had all the hallmarks of a bug… and as it turns out, a but it is. As it turns out, the problem is caused because ...

In this hands-on tutorial, Ars will show you how to use Automator to build platform services that incorporate shell scripting.