No matter how cleverly or reliably you set up a system for sharing calendars, it all depends on your partner / spouse / work colleague / children / significant other looking at the calendar from time to time. What if they don’t?

George Starcher has the same problem as I do, and he has the answer. He explains how to create an Automator action that will pull out the events for the upcoming week from individual iCal calendars and email them to your significant other and/or negligent fellow worker.

Moving carefully through his steps in Automator and setting the resulting plug-in to run in iCal takes about five minutes.

Some of this steps are, in fact, unnecessary. You don’t need to create a calendar for the plug-in in iCal first, saving it as an iCal plug-in will create an Automator calendar for you.

The end result is a nice email full of what’s coming up:

Of course, success depends on the theory that the significant other is more likely to read an email than look at a calendar. YMMV. automator, ical, collaboration, sharing, calenders, events, mail.app, apple mail, productivity

David Chartier at The Unofficial Apple Weblog took one look at a recent macOSXHints tip about emailing files quickly with Finder’s Folder Actions, and decided it was way too much work to set up.

Instead he developed an Automator Action to do the same job.

When you have configured, it does the same job as the Folder Action, and can be placed as a droplet in the Dock or added to the Finder’s Contextual menu.

It’s available with some instructions on the TUAW web site .

Alternatively, you could look at the bundle of three Automator Actions that make up Desktop Mailer on the Automator.us site.

This Collection of Autmator Actions was featured on Hawk Wings way back in the olden days.

It provides workflows to create a new message containing the selected file, another to send the file off automatically to a predetermined email address or a final one that archives the file(s) first.

Whichever way you go, this is a time-saver for anyone who frequently emails files. mail.app, apple mail, automator, folder actions, files, email, productivity

todoPod is an Automator action that takes a note or to-do you have written, records it and then syncs it to an iPod, where it is available in the “Notes” section and in a VoiceNotes playlist.

Grocery lists, short motivational snippets, thoughts and tasks for the day, as well the more traditional “to-do” can now travel with you wherever you go. (If you have an iPod. I don’t, although recently I nearly cracked, so I couldn’t test this.)

todoPod is freeware and available from Thought Bottle Software’s web site .ipod, to-do, productivity, notes, reminders, voice recording, automator

Jochen Wolters at MacDevCenter likes the new to-do and notes features in Leopard Mail. He thinks that

The addition of to-do’s and notes to Mail may indicate that Apple has some useful ideas for enhancing a “non-glamourous” application like Mail beyond just beautiful eye candy.

But his ambitions for Mail don’t stop there. He would like to see the development of “Folder action”-like workflows through AppleScript and Automator. Some of this is already here, he notes, with Mail Act-on and other plugins. Nonetheless,

I’d love to see the equivalent to the Finder’s Folder Actions for every mailbox in Mail, multiple varieties for core functionality like ‘Reply’…, message threading across mailboxes, automatic filing of messages based on those threads, etc…
…Adding workflows which average users could create and edit, and which would advance automated email handling in ways that makes even die-hard productivity geeks smile, could make Apple Mail stand out from the crowd for more than just its good-looking UI.

mail.app, apple mail, automator, applescript, filing, workflow, productivity, rules, folder actions

Rob Griffiths at MacWorld has posted a tip that will reduce the amout of paper you use in printing out mutiple emails.

He outlines how to create an Automator workflow that combines the multiple messages into one for printing, how to save the workflow in a useable form and then link it to an AppleScript for efficient launching.

Saves money; saves trees. Nice.mail.app, apple mail. printing, saving, paper, multiple messages, automator, applescript

There are ways to assign hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts to just about everything.

Service Scrubber brings them to Services, FastScripts to AppleScripts, you can even roll your own for a Menu item in any app.

Now, using Shortcuts 1.0, you can add them to Contextual Menu items as well.

It only works with Contextual Menu items that are provided by plugins, like items Automator and Folder Actions add to the Contextual Menu by default.

Assigning the shortcuts is easy. The app’s window lists the items that can be assigned hotkeys. Here is a screenshot half-way through assigning one to the Automator action, “EmailObject” (something I used a lot before I discovered Quicksilver):

click on the image for a full-sized view

Another window pops up prompting you to define the keystrokes for that item, say, Command-Control-Option-E. That’s it.

Now all I have to do is highlight a file in Finder, hit the hotkey combination and the file is passed to a new message in Mail.app. Clever.

It comes with a plugin of its own, called “CocoaTextSelectionHelper” which is an optional helper to get text selection from the front text view in Cocoa applications.

Shortcuts is freeware and available from the developer’s web site where you can also find a fuller online explanation of how it works.productivity, contextual menu, shortcuts, hotkeys, keyboard shortcuts, automator, folder actions, cocoa text

The Automator web site contains a treasure trove of actions and tutorials on harnessing the power of Mac OS ‘s X Automator.

Some of these actions work with Mail.app to automate it and help you get things done more quickly.

Desktop Mailer offers three Automator actions to speed up the emailing of files.

Following the step-by-step tutorials creates three actions that can be added to Finder’s Contextual Menu, allowing you to add a selected item to a new mail message, to archive selected items in a zip file and email them or to just add selected items to an email:

Of course, you can do some of these things with Quicksilver or simply by dropping the files onto Mails Dock icon, but this way may suit some people better.

Another workflow automatically adds photos in emails from particular senders to a project in your Aperture library.

The iWeb Action Pack adds five Automator actions to iWeb, including one that will automatically extract images from cell phone messages sent to your email account and add them to your iWeb blog.

[Thanks, Nyhthawk, for the tip]automator, iweb, aperture, files, mail.app, apple mail, automation, tips, plugins