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I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year. I ended up having lots of fun and being as busy as ever. The first post of the year will be dedicated to adding iTunes media, music, videos etc using the Services menu and an Automator application. iTunes 9 added a new feature called “Automatically Add To iTunes” its simply a folder that iTunes is always looking at found in your iTunes music folder. Add a file to the folder and iTunes will add it to your library. A very good way of quickly adding files and folders. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to add a Services menu to take advantage of this menu. I will also show you how you can use it in other ways.

The title sounds like an oxymoron but in theory, this method can actually speed up a login. A login process usually follows these lines; you enter your password, it authenticate you. You are then let in and it begins to load items like the Finder, Dock and other essential processes. The final step is to load all of the apps you have set to load at login. This is where you computer can slow down, the other steps you can’t do a lot about. If you have 10 applications you want to launch at login your Mac can grind to a halt, simply because you really stress your hard drive. If you can time when you want to applications to launch you can speed up the login as a whole.

I like the use of PDF’s, they work well and (usually) appear the same on ever computer. One of the advantages of PDF’s is the text embedded within the file, and the abilty to manipulate. Although many PDF readers have functions to copy and paste text, whats quicker than creating an Automator script to extract PDF text into a text file.

Yesterday I was messing around with Apple Script and I couldn’t for the life of me make a simple work flow that would backup certain files to a network hard drive. Out of frustration I turned to Automator. Realizing what a fool I was I managed to make a simple backup work flow within a couple of minutes, after spending hours in Apple Script. This post is going to show you how to make a simple backup work flow to copy across files to a seperate disk. Although you could use Time Machine this is designed for specific files and if you only want to back up one file.