Good afternoon. My name is Emilie. I'm an Automator Software Engineer. And I'd first of all, I'd like to thank DJ Jason in the back for the great music that you heard before this session. Thanks, Jason. Great way to start off the last session of the week. So for those of you who maybe are just sitting in here looking for a place to check your email before you catch your flights home today, the first thing I'm going to talk about is what Automator is.

So we'll catch you guys up. And those of you who already familiar with Automator can just kind of sit back and relax a little bit. Though, I will be talking about what's new in Snow Leopard, so maybe you should pay a little bit of attention. After that, we'll be talking about how you can take Automator workflows and add them to your application. Therefore, extending your application's functionality and enabling your users to customize your application. After that, we'll be talking about how you can take your application's functionality and put them into Automator Actions, and then use those actions to put your application into the rest of the system.

So first, let's go back and talk about Automator. What is Automator? Aside from arguably being the coolest icon on the system, Automator is an application in that first shipped with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. And it's an application that you use to automate repetitive tasks. Once you're able to automate these tasks, you can then customize your system to pretty much do whatever you want it to do. The terminology we'll be using in this session is workflow. An Automator workflow is the process of actually accomplishing this task, and you do this by stringing together a bunch of Automator Actions. This is kind of similar to UNIX pipes.

How you have a bunch of commands and you string them together using pipes. So let's take a look at Automator. This is a screen shot. On the right side of the screen, you'll see that there is a workflow view and that contains a workflow, which is, if you recall, the act of actually accomplishing this automated task.

And then you have a bunch of actions that are strung together in the workflow. Now, once you have an Automator workflow what can you do with it? Clearly you can run it inside of Automator, but you can also run it in many other places as a stand-alone application, in the Finder, as an iCal plug-in, or maybe even a print PDF plug-in, so when you save as PDF you can actually run a workflow on that. Also in Snow Leopard, we've added the ability to make workflows into Services, which you probably have heard a lot about during the week and we'll talk more about that.

So to create these different kinds of workflows we've added a new Template Chooser in Automator as you can see here enumerating the different kinds of workflows that you can create. And I'd like to draw your attention to the Services one for just a second. If you recall, Services in Leopard and prior versions of Mac OS X were kind of not so great to use.

They're supposed to be very contextual and relevant to what you had selected. For example, if you had the Text Creating Service, this is so easy even a manager can do it. To run a service on this you would have to go. I see we have a lot of disgruntled employees here.