. Workflows as Programs and Plug-ins Building an Automator workflow is a satisfying intellectual exercise and a delicious talent to acquire | . Workflows as Programs and Plug-ins Building an Automator workflow is a satisfying intellectual exercise and a delicious talent to acquire. But if the point of all the effort is to create a saving step-saving software robot there seems to be something missing. Are you really going to open the Automator program just to run a workflow you ve written Nope. You can save a workflow as a regular double-clickable application if you like or embed it in shortcut menus all over your Mac. . Saving a Workflow as an Application If you just choose File Save you create an Automator Workflow file with filename extension .workflow . That s the format of most ready-to-use workflows you ll find online too. In the Save As dialog box however there s another choice for saving your workflows as an application Figure 7-13 . A workflow saved as an application has all the benefits associated with normal Mac OS X programs. You can double-click its Finder icon to launch it drag it to the Dock for one-click launching or with the addition of file-launching shareware like LaunchBar or iKey even associate a key combination with it so that you can run your workflow with a quick press of a function key. Figure 7-13. Automator has two choices for workflow formats Workflow the default and Application the non-default . If you re not sure which format you ll want to use for a particular workflow you can save it once in each format the workflow runs equally well either way. So why wouldn t you just save your workflows as applications all the time First workflow applications are much larger than workflow documents as much as 20 times larger. That s a big deal if you plan to distribute your workflows online or via email. Also when a workflow application runs it doesn t give you access to the Workflow log see the box on Section a big downside if you want to monitor the progress of your workflow in minute detail. Instead you get a dinky action indicator in the menu bar as shown in Figure 7-14.
