Building Your Own Workflow You could spend all day playing with the workflows Apple gives you, making minor tweaks and seeing how they affect the workflow's progress. | . Building Your Own Workflow You could spend all day playing with the workflows Apple gives you making minor tweaks and seeing how they affect the workflow s progress. You could even download more preassembled workflows from or Apple s own if you were so inclined. Still those options don t give you the kind of hands-on experience you need if you ever want to automate your Mac on your own. That s why the following pages walk you through building three different Automator workflows from scratch. Along the way you ll learn several tricks that you ll find handy when you start building your own workflows. Tip If you re feeling lazy you can download the completed workflow projects from this book s Missing CD page . . Emailing an iTunes Song So you re listening to a song in iTunes and you re seized by an overwhelming urge to email it to someone. Maybe you think your mom would like to hear the new Britney Spears hit hey she s your mom or that your brother would be interested in your latest GarageBand opus he probably isn t . The traditional process for emailing a song is a huge pain locating the song in iTunes Control-clicking it choosing Show in Finder from the shortcut menu creating a new message in Mail addressing it typing out a subject and short body message dragging the song file from the Finder into the email message and finally clicking Send. Life s too short. Automator can greatly simplify this process. With a simple two-action workflow you can locate a song from your iTunes Library set up all the email information you want in a dialog box and have Automator attach the song file automatically. Figure 7-8 shows what the final workflow looks like. Figure 7-8. Your new workflow lets you pick a song in your iTunes Library top and then attach the song to a new email message. This action is a heck of a lot easier than trying to do all the steps manually. Note Your recipient may not .
