You can find Automator in the Applications folder. Once started, it’ll ask you for choosing a template for your workflow. Workflow is the name of what you create in Automator, a succession of tasks you want to bundle together to.. well.. automate. Most of the times you’ll want to select the Service template: the resulting workflow will then be added in the Services menu, which appears when you click the name of any opened app in the top menu bar.

Once you picked a template, you are presented with a HUGE list of tasks you can chose from. You’ll drag them to the right panel of the app, in the logical order of your actions. Save with a clear name and, boom, you got yourself a nice little automator service.

What kind of tasks can you automate? Pretty much everything, from renaming a bunch of files, resizing pictures or changing the image types, to emailing files as attachments, make video captures from the current movie playing or automagically converting PDF files to plain text ones.

TUAW has a list of 5 pretty cool and useful automator services you can create in no time:

1. Attach selected files to a new Mail (identical to what happens in Windows when you right click on a file and select the “Send To” option)
2. Print Selected Files
3. Create thumbnails/resize selected images
4. Start Keynote Slideshow(open up a keynote presentation directly in slideshow mode)
5. Bit.ly shorten a URL(you’ll need to download a piece of software as well)

Personally, I have 3 vital automator services that I use really often:

1. Batch rename files
   
2. Resize image files
   
3. Change images type
   

Notice how I checked the ’show this action when workflow runs’. When I select a bunch of files in Finder and then chose the respective option in the Services menu, there will be a popup showing the Automator action. I will therefore be able to pick exactly the new image type or size that I want to apply, or what to change in the selected files names.

You probably won’t use Automator very often; but it’s certain that once in a while you’ll be so pissed off from having to repeat the same task over and over again (like renaming all pictures in a folder, from PICT_01_15.JPG to JohnAndMarryWedding_15.jpg), that 10 seconds spent in Automator will save you full hours of mindless repeating work. And I hope that you’ll mentally thank me for this modest but hopefully useful post.

Freshly baked, hot from the oven, my first osx app with hideous graphics which can only get better.

The Self Help Classics iPhone E-book collection

Created using my own personal iPhone ebook software (TouchBooksReader), this book collection follows the same basic idea of the famous Classics.app of Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu : a hand-picked bookshelf of major classic masterpieces in the fields of Self Help, Personal Improvement or Productivity.


So far, Self Help Classics contains:

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill – the biggest seller of Hill’s books, selling over 20 million copies worldwide, and probably the most successful motivational book in history
• The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie and Joseph Berg Esenwein – a best-seller in all its re-editions, since 1915 to the present. Learn how to talk to conferences, how to sustain presentations and to become a captivating and charismatic speaker.
• The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles – has been cited by the author of the bestselling The Secret as a primary source
• The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel – developer of the Law of Attraction theory, which has been acknowledged as one of the primary sources for The Secret.
• Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth – a famous essay written in 1758 for the Poor Richard’s Almanac
• Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell – originated as a speech, one of the most successful in its times, delivered over 6,000 times around the world. It became a short book the success of which financed the creation of Temple University

And here comes the fun and really interesting part:

1. there’s a SPECIAL SALE for the first few days of the app launch: $0.99 instead of the regular $2.99! Don’t miss it, it’s a limited time offer!
2. In the following free updates I’ll be adding to this impressive pack other classics about success, self improvement, wealth, business or entrepreneurship. This is where you can join in: either by using the TouchBooksReader contact form or by leaving a comment below, you can suggest any number of major works to be included in the Self Help Classics collection. The one criterion is that you recommend real classics – we only want to publish great classic works that stood the test of time.
   
   The authors of the first 5 comments will automatically get free promotional codes for downloading Self Help Classics on their iPhone/iPod Touch.
   
   The best 5 suggestions will receive promo codes for both Self Help Classics and the fairy tales ebook Wonderful Stories Collection.
   
   Even if you don’t have a iPhone / iPod Touch, you can still join in the discussion and share your ideas.
   
3. Also, promotional free access codes will also be given to the first 10 bloggers who blog about Self Help Classics (at their choice, one promotional code for any of my iPhone ebook apps)!

What do you say? Care for a comment or suggestion?

Update:
It just came to my attention that the aforementioned promotional codes only work in the US version of the AppStore. Sorry to my non-US readers out there.

Quick question: what is the One and only most essential tool for any productivity fan?

You guessed it – the calendar.

There are many reasons why you’d want to use Google Calendar for your time management: first of all, it’s free; second, it’s online(you can access it from everywhere). Third, it has SMS alerts, which is probably the single feature I use most. The one major downside of Google Calendar has is… being an online tool; a less than perfect user interface, less than instantaneous responsiveness. Luckily, this all is in the past as of today:

Google announced CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal(version 3.x – on Mac OS X v10.5+ ). In layman’s terms, this means seamless bidirectional synchronization of calendar events. No more awkward emails, no more missed meetings(actually.. this isn’t such a good news, as we all know it – meetings are productivity killers).

Here’s a step by step walkthrough in setting up Google Calendar synchronization:

1. First, you download on your OSX 10.5 mac the setup tool, called Calaboration. It’s in zip format, so you’ll want to unarchive it. Go ahead and run it, entering your Google login credentials, then click Sign In.

2. Select which of the Google Calendars you want to add to your iCal.
3. If you haven’t already added your Google email(login) to Address Book, you’ll want to do this, or else “You won’t be able to invite or email guests to Google Calendar events within iCal if your address is not in your Address Book.”

4. Your Google Calendar will now appear in iCal’s list of calendars, and iCal will sync any changes to and from Google Calendar.

Event information will refresh every 5 minutes; if you want to change this interval, you can do it in the iCal > Preferences > Accounts menu, from the ‘Refresh calendars’ drop-down. You can also refresh calendars manually, by pressing the Apple and R keys at the same time.

This is it. Easy and efficient, much like most of Google’s online tools.
Happy productivity everyone. And remember to keep yourselves out of meetings.

However, just like so many things in my life, turning a nicely put “method” into a productive habit is… almost impossible for me – my attention span lasts at most a couple of weeks, as if I were related to the common goldfish.

The one method that’d work for me… generally, would be one where I could write down my projects and goals, somehow mark my progress (I’m in constant need for confirmation and gratification, just to keep me going), automatically have it under my eyes on a regular basis (I kept forgetting to open up the GTD software I’ve been trying for the last couple of years), help me prioritize between different tasks and, most importantly, be really easy to use(no complicated setup, hierarchies or folders).

There is a lot of software out there that meets this criteria, offline or online. The one I use for the time being is TaskFive. Gorgeous, really easy to use, pretty effective.

What it is not:

This is not the classic GTD tool. Not even a remote relative of GTD software you might know of.

What it is:

TaskFive.com is mostly an online task management tool for an individual or for a team(company).
Unlike GTD or other similar task management tools, it looks and behaves mostly like an online timetable for the current week. You can allocate tasks for today, tomorrow or any other day(although you only get to see one week at a time), but you can’t allocate more than 5 tasks for a given day.
This is what I like about it, actually: a quota of 5 tasks for a day is big enough to be useful, yet small enough to force you to prioritize; otherwise, the whole purpose of GTD would be lost and you’d get tens of overwhelming, minor, insignificant tasks.
Another reason why it works so far for me is because it’s really easy to use and set up. After creating a user account, there’s no extra setup necessary; no labels, folders, no recurring alarm setup. Nothing redundant or unimportant.

The need for instant gratification and progress tracking is achieved by checking out the items of today’s (or any other day’s) list. Reaching the weekend after having checked all your 5*5 tasks for the past week is pretty rewarding.

What I think is really the killer feature of the app is that it’s targeted at companies, not individuals. While an individual can use it like a simple task / gtd tool, the project manager can use it as a simple team project management that works. A company can add more users to the same page, so that they(and their manager) can see their individual progress during the week. Some reports are available, as well as SMS notifications(though I didn’t quite get what they are supposed to do). It’s worth mentioning that the company account costs(quite a bit actually – €9 per user after 2 users).

To close up, I really like this: the UI looks and feels great, the app is simple yet beautiful and effective, and having it bookmarked as my starting page helped me get more organized and feel more productive for the last week or so. Knowing that such a product was developed in less than 5 days using Ruby on Rails is the final cherry on the cake.

So, here’s a couple of productivity-related links received from my readers during the last year or so, togetger with a bit of link love :

• 45 mobile resources for the road warrior
• A simple GTD online tool – Task Writer
• Time management teleseminars from time experts
• GTD agenda – another nice looking GTD online tool
• Eluma – “It’s like iTunes, but for your web stuff instead of your music, a free desktop-downloadable personal productivity tool”
• GTDInbox, a Firefox addon for Gmail that “transforms Gmail into a powerhouse of productivity”

Enjoy your productive day, and keep in touch : I’m back, baby!

One of the “custom” search engines I had installed was called Flickr Tags. Ironically, though, using it was always a burden. Most of the times I didn’t want to simply search Flickr; what I wanted instead was to search Flickr for Creative Commons images(ones I could put on my blog, for instance), sorted by interestingness (to keep the lame ones out). One way to do this would have been to simply search Mycroft Project for a better one. One other way, though, was to just create my own custom search engine, and this proved to be much simpler than expected (the proof is the little plugin over on mycroft.mozdev.org called Flickr Creative Commons Interesting).

For tutorial purposes, I’ll show you how to build, step by step, a Firefox Search Engine for Twitter contacts.

For this:

1. We’ll need a favicon for the project. Let’s go to http://twitter.com/favicon.ico and save it on our computer.
2. Go to http://mycroft.mozdev.org/submitos.html. Check the “Full Instructions” checkbox if you need verbose indications, or just continue.
3. Choose the icon as the Twitter favicon you previously saved.
4. Fill in the project name, your email, the project description..
5. Now for the nice part: The Search URL:
   
   When I used the search feature on Twitter (see screenshot), I saw that the page url gets changed to include the searched terms. I’ll just copy the url in the Search URL: field, replacing my searched terms by {searchTerms}. Therefore, a url like http://twitter.com/tw/search/users?q=george gets changed into http://twitter.com/tw/search/users?q={searchTerms}. Easy as PI!
6. Fill in the remaining fields: the plugin category, language, default page(Search Form URL:), comment.
   
7. Click on Generate Plugin

That’s it, you’re done. You’ll see a link to your plugins list. Clicking on the plugin’s name will prompt you to add it in the Firefox Search Engines bar.

It took me less than 2 minutes, and I got my custom search engine. You can do it as well. What’s best, by carefully looking at other parameters a search form sends you can, for instance, change the sort order, fine grain the search results and more.

If you ever find yourself using an online search form time and time again, you should consider using(or even creating) a Firefox custom search engine that could save you many hours in the future.

In my freshman year of college(Computer Science) I was just discovering the Internet and the vast information one could get from it. Those were the days of MsDOS, Windows 95 and Windows 98, and my geek hobby back then was to subscribe to e-zines of the underground computer virus geeks. I never learned to build a computer virus(it’s bad, evil and it turns you into a criminal) but, being young and restless, I enjoyed reading how one could conceive such software that resembled most to real life-forms – the smallest and code efficient possible, which could replicate, mutate and propagate around. Nothing much stuck with me from that wild age except for a broader understanding of computers, operating systems and assembly language and, completely unrelated, the tale of one of those virus developers.

The guy was stuck at some point trying to understand how to work around the limitations(security) of Windows 98; he had tried all ideas that came to mind, and was starting to get desperate and frustrated. Yet, at one moment, he decided to just lay back. Closed the monitor, closed his eyes. Tried to think of nothing. Quarter of hour later he was coding furiously and excited. His (memory quote) computer coding Zen had struck again.

Without naming it, I’ve been using this method since highschool; now, in my computer programmer existence, I use it more than ever. Whenever I’m facing a bug I can’t understand, whenever something eludes me no matter how hard I try or how much documentation I read, I will stop.

I breathe, I take a walk around the office, get some water from the watercooler. Chat with friends. When coming back to my computer, 10 minutes later, I close my eyes and try to think of nothing. Call it Zen meditation if you prefer; call it  yourKitKat moment.

I prefer to call it Seiza – the seated 1 minute meditation before martial arts training. Letting my mind free of all thoughts is just what we perceive on the outside; on the inside, our subconscious keeps working, freed from the outside stimuli and conscious noise.

More often than once, stepping back is all it takes to solve even the biggest problem.

[photo courtesy of Flickr]

It’s this kind of small things that make one’s day better and motivate him to get going.

Quickly, tell me the web browser you use most frequently.

What? Do I hear anything other than Firefox? You’re most certainly way behind on our Productivity 101 lesson.

Quickly, tell me what’s your most frequent way to google or search stuff online.

If you tell me you click on Firefox’s address bar, type www.google.com then Enter, then you’re definitely not making good use of your time and fingers. There’s a better, faster, easier way to google from Firefox – the quicksearch field on the right-top corner. Just type Ctrl+K (or, on Mac, Cmd+K) and you’ve changed focus to the quicksearch field. Type what u want to search for, Enter, and Google opens up with the results.

But the best news is that from the quicksearch bar you can use many search engines in addition to the default Google one. After Ctrl+K, just press Ctrl+Down/Ctrl+Up (or, on Mac, Cmd+Down/Cmd+Up) to quickly pick another search engine from your list – you can use Yahoo, Ask, Wikipedia or many more – basically, any website can provide its own Firefox search engine. And.. this is where our title starts to make sense:

What are your top 10 Firefox search engines?

My favorite Firefox search engines make me lots more productive when conducting most internet research tasks. I’ll just show them briefly, but wait, in the comments, for your suggestions:

1. Google – no comments required
2. Yahoo – because Google sometimes is not relevant enough..
3. Wikipedia – probably the most useful of them all – whenever you want actual info instead of just websites..
4. Imdb – infos on movies
5. Mininova – search for the films themselves
6. YouTube
7. Technorati
8. del.icio.us – because sometimes Google and Yahoo are irellevant, and u might just want cool websites
9. Flickr
10. The Pirate Bay – Mininova alternative

What about you? What are the search engines you use on a daily basis?