1. Create a stunning Keynote presentation to be played on a Windows pc

The Windows world has had the misfortune of hosting slideshows that are typically the product of PowerPoint. We have seen them a hundred times, basic bullets with a few inappropriate transitions thrown in because the creator thought they were cool.

Go ahead and create in Keynote as you would if presenting on a Mac. Now export the file to a Quick Time movie. This will allow Windows to be able to play back the presentation with all it’s goodness. The Windows PC will need the free Quicktime player. Whether your using manual transitions, automated builds, including audio/video - the QT movie will retain all of your desired effects. Your Windows colleagues will almost certainly comment on your production and wonder how you did such things in PowerPoint.

2. Download a free trial of a Productivity App

One of the beauties of Mac OSX is the developer community and the products they create. A common way for these companies to get their product out is to offer free trial software. It is almost a given that if written for OSX - a full functioning trial version of the software is available to try out. A very different experience than a crippled version of the program with only half the features enabled. This allows you to use the program to it’s fullness and make a qualified decision and determine if it's for you. Of course, full functioning trials are not a “Mac only” thing, but more of a standard compared to software trials in other operating systems.

3. Check the last time your maintenance scripts ran

Mac OSX has built in maintenance scripts that help keep your system running in top shape. The scripts are scheduled to run in the wee morning hours of the morning. But often your Mac could be turned off, sleeping or another state that may prevent these scripts from running. An easy way to determine the last time they ran is to simply look at the modified dates of the associated files.

From the Go menu item in Finder, select Go to Folder....

In the dialog box type /var/log

You are looking for 3 files

daily.out

weekly.out

monthly.out

Notice the modified date for each to determine the last time these scripts were executed. If all are running on schedule, the daily.out would have a very recent modified date, the weekly.out could be up to 7 days old and the monthly.out could be several weeks.

Not to panic if they haven't run in some time. Just leave your machine on at night to more routinely have these maintenance scripts do their thing. You can also download free maintenance programs such as Onyx to run these built-in scripts on-demand. And if your really feeling like a geek, you can learn the syntax and do everything natively in the Terminal.

Automator is one of the coolest parts of OSX. It enables us to create complicated workflows and automate tasks. Think of Automator as a ‘recipe’ to get something done. Using a simple, visual interface - you build a step-by-step process by picking common tasks from a list and stacking them in a predictable manner. These can be a single action program to a multi-step sequence that performs a very comprehensive set of instructions

I believe the average Mac user doesn't dabble much in Automator because we don’t need to. The operating system provides much of everything we need. But where Automator shines is being able to automate workflows for application specific tasks.

Maybe you have the need to target a bunch of documents, convert them to pdf’s, copy them to a back-up drive and email them to someone else. You could create the steps in Automator and run the workflow whenever you want. With one click - it can do all of those steps automatically. Once you build it, its a tool ready to be used at any time.

Let's try an easy one

Like many photographers, I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for my Raw conversions and image organization. But I also use iPhoto for an important purpose - the tight integration to other Apple devices and services. iPhoto is the portal to iPods, iPhones, AppleTV and Mobile Me galleries. These are very good reasons to have your Lightroom images also live in iPhoto.

So this is where automator can help. We build a simple automator application, along with an export preset in Lightroom to do it all for us.

Step 1 - Automator

Launch Automator and choose Application from template chooser

select Photos from the Library modules to display the image related tasks
double click import Files into iPhoto
check the delete source images after importing them option
Select the File menu and save as "import to iPhoto" to your applications folder
Close Automator

Step 2 - Lightroom

While in the library module select the Export... button. This will open the export dialog box.

Start at the top and select the file settings of your choice.

Choose your desktop for the export to folder, but you will soon see this part does not really matter.

But consider where the images will ultimately go from iPhoto. If it is an iPhone, you could easily down size. If it’s an AppleTV connected to a large HD TV you may want the full size file.

Now here is the trick

In the Post-Processing section, select the drop down and select Open in Other Application...
Click the Choose button and select the “import to iPhoto” app you just saved in your Application foler
Once all options are set as desired, click the Add button in the export dialog box.
Name it “import to iPhoto” and save. You just created a Lightroom preset export.
Now Cancel out of the export dialog box

Step 3 - Try it Out

Browse your catalog and select the desired image(s), choose the Export button and select the newly created preset “import to iPhoto” and click Export and watch the magic.

Your images will be exported from LR, then imported to iPhoto and the exported files on the desktop will get trashed.

We could have created this Lightroom-to-iPhoto export preset just as easily without the automator application. However, by using it, we were able to have those files we exported to the desktop automatically deleted.

Pretty cool, right?

This is just the small taste of what Automator could bring to your workflow. Think about the tasks you routinely do and it's very likely you can build a workflow in Automator to simplify your life.

For more information using Automator check out http://www.macosxautomation.com/automator/index.html.