Thursday, June 17, 2010

Automator to the rescue

    The long awaited E3 conference is here and I couldn't wait to watch Ubisoft's stall & developers staging its latest mind-blowing games! Wow! Assassin's creed bloodlines is going to awesome & a new Michael Jackson game for fans is rolling out soon! (For those of you wondering what this E3 conf is... it's all about games - Hardware & software. Why don't you follow the wiki link or E3's link?)

Jdownloader helped me persist the youtube videos in my HDD to watch later. The low quality videos (all except AC Brotherhood in HD ;-)) were downloaded, thanks to JD. Problem popped up when each single video was individually downloaded into a separate folder. Now I have to move every little file into some folder, say 'E3 Conference'. Or..... why not use automator of Mac OS X!

For newbies, Automator is an app that can be used to automate your jobs. (Now, Cool down! I know that didn't help! ;-)) A simple example: Remember that hundreds of pics that you captured on a tour and wanted to rename them one by one. It must've been exhausting... You thought of completing it later. Only that later never came.  Things like that can be done easily.

Our problem definition again: 11 videos. 11 separate files in 11 different folders. I hate too much branching (folders here).

Expected results: 11 videos in 1 folder.

You know the usual solution of course(Drag, drop, delete)! Now to the automator kinda solution!

To give you a clear picture: Here's how the folder looks before running the automator workflow.



And here's how it looks after moving them!




Here's the tiny workflow with just 3 actions that achieved this!


If that doesn't make sense, no worries! The following post will clear the fog!

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