Apple® Automator with AppleScript® Bible

Preface

This book was a lot of fun to write. I've been playing around with AppleScript and Automator for years, and with other scripting languages (notably UNIX shell and Perl) for about a decade before that. I'm positively in love with the subject of Getting Things Done, and not just in a I-need-to-knock-out-this-checklist kind of way.

The world we live in is a wonderful place. Never before have we been so connected to human events, to the brands we buy, to the people we love, to our colleagues. The advent of the World Wide Web and social media tools has added a huge amount of data influx to each of our lives—that on top of all the mainstream media, books, music, film, and other infostuff we consume.

At the same time, computing power has skyrocketed to unthinkable levels. When my father worked for UNIVAC in the 1960s, the story goes, they carted 4KB of memory around in surplus torpedo casings. When you hear stories like that, it makes you wonder if he was just pulling my leg. However, think about this—the iPhone in your pocket likely has more computing power in it than all the computers used by the Apollo 11 astronauts to land on the moon 40 years ago this summer.

So there you have it—a huge influx of tasks on one side of the ledger, and raw computing power on the other. What's needed is an easy, intuitive way to process all the stuff in our lives faster and more efficiently.

Enter Automator and AppleScript, two fantastic automation technologies built right in to Mac OS X. My sincere ...