This isn’t anything new to Mac OS X users, but for me as a newly baked one, Automator sure is a handy little tool. It’s basically an app for automating tasks. You create a workflow made up of various actions, which come from your installed apps. It seems pretty much anything will have actions set up that you can use in Automator.
Here’s one I knocked up for doing my last post:
Team Fortress 2 dumps its screen shots out as TGA files but for my blog I wanted them in JPEG format. Its dead simple with Automator.
In Finder (Macs version of Explorer), I selected the files I was after, right clicked, then selected More > Automator > Create Workflow… That gave me a new workflow with the top section automatically added. I then searched through the list of the Actions on the left for Change Type of Images, which when added gave me a prompt to add in the Copy Finder Items. I made the copy put the files in a subfolder off where they originally were and then changed the image type to JPEG.
And that was it, I hit Run and it did the job. There is nothing built into Windows that does anything like that! (As far as I’m aware?) Previously I’d have to had some kind of image program installed in order to do that. Yay for Macs!
how`d u play TF2 on a mac eh?
everything built-in-windows is a pos there is no reason to use its apps
I wouldnt mind if it came w/o any shit at all
ACDsee does img batch convert/process finely
Spd, I have a partition with Vista on (thanks to Bootcamp), so I boot into that :)
I used to use the batch convert in Paint Shop Pro but I don’t use PSP anymore (replaced it with Paint.net). Plus I’ve not had to do a batch conversion like that for yonks.
I think the Windows approach to including free stuff is to include half baked crap like Paint and Outlook Express / Mail, so that, as you said, you have to buy things in. The free stuff on Mac OS seems to be less crappy and more useful!