If you own a Mac computer from Apple, and you want to automate some actions that you do on an every day basis, but you’re not a programmer, there’s a free application on your computer named Automator that may be just what you need. The Mac Automator has really grown into a powerful tool over the last few years, and here’s a quick look at how you can mac app create your own Mac apps with the Automator.
A Simple Mac App – Open Common URLs
As a quick example, let’s say the first thing you do every morning is you start your browser, and you look at the news on your favorite three websites. Rather than open your browser, create three tabs, and type in your URLs, you can let the Automator do this work for you. With the Automator you can create your own “workflows”, and once you’ve create a workflow you like, you can even save it as a Mac application.
(In this article I won’t show you how to create a workflow that creates three tabs — that takes a little longer to explain — but I will show you how to open your desired URLs in new Safari windows.)
To get started creating your new Automator workflow, click the Applications icon in the Mac Dock, then click the Automator icon. When the Automator starts, click the “Custom” icon.
Above the second column on the left side of the Automator window, you’ll see a search field. In that field type the word “Safari”, and press [Enter]. That limits the actions in that column to only actions that relate to Safari, which is what we want.
The Websites You Want To Be Opened Automatically
Next, click the “Get Specified URLs” action, and drag it to the open area on the right side of the Automator window. After you do this, type in the URLs of the websites you want to be opened automatically. The first URL defaults to Apple’s website, but you can change it to whatever you’d like, then add your other URLs using the Add button. (If you have a problem entering text, make sure you double-click on the existing words in the textfields, it’s a little picky.)
When you’ve finished that, go back to that second column and drag the “New Safari Documents” action to the open area on the right side of the Automator, and drop it in the open area below the “Get Specified URLs” box. When you do this, the Automator will try to show you that the data from the first box will magically feed into the second box. That is, the URLs in the first box will be used as input to the “New Safari Documents” action.
To test your workflow, press the Run button at the top-right of the Automator window. This should launch Safari and open the three URLs you entered.
Saving Your Workflow
Now that you have a “workflow” that works, guess what? What you’ve really done is you’ve just created a new computer program. You can now save this program as a new workflow, or as a Mac application. (That’s right, you can save your program as a Mac application — you’re a programmer.)
To do this, click the File menu, then click Pro Display XDR the Save As menu item. Name your file anything you’d like, save it wherever you’d like, but be sure to change the File Format to “Application” before pressing the Save button.
Assuming you named the file “MyFavorites” and you saved it as an application on your Mac Desktop, the application icon should appear on your Desktop. You can now double-click it just like any other Mac application, and even drag it to the Dock if you prefer.
Mac Apps – You Can Do Much More
As you can see from the wealth of available actions in the Mac Automator, you can create many, many more types of workflows and applications with the Automator.
