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Get your morning news with Automator  7

Being a creature of habit I like to get up in the morning, wash and get dressed, have some coffee, eat my breakfast and then sit myself in front of my iMac with another coffee and catch up on all the news that’s broken since I hoisted myself into bed 11 hours earlier - I check my email, read my news feeds and then check a few websites along with my customers sites to make sure every thing’s ticking over nicely.

It doesn’t take much effort to launch all the applications and click on the appropriate buttons I need to get the computer part of this morning routine done, but I thought it’d be nice if I could cut down the amount of brain power needed by having everything ready for me by the time I took my place at the desk. Why? Partly because I’m not usually firing on all cylinders until I’ve been awake for about an hour and partly because I’m bored and I wanted something to do. As the more observant amongst you may have deduced: I’m going to be doing this with OS X’s not-brilliant-but-still-fairly-useful Automator.

For this process, I’m assuming that Mail is your default email client, Safari is your default web browser and NewsFire is your feed reader of choice. Also, whenever I say something like:

Add the Mail » Get New Mail action

… I’m actually saying:

Select Mail in the “Library” column of the Automator window and drag the Get New Mail action from the “Action” column into the workflow area in the right-hand side of the Automator window

So, firing up Automator we can tackle the easy bits first, i.e. checking email and launching the feed reader:

• add the Mail » Get New Mail action and select All Accounts or whichever account your prefer from the For: drop-down list;
• add the Finder » Launch Application action and select NewsFire from the drop-down list - obviously, you can select a different feed reader or indeed any application you want to launch.

If your email application isn’t already open then the Get New Mail action will launch it.

The next bit, opening my web browser with various websites displayed, wasn’t as easy - it’s by no means difficult but took a bit of trial and error to get right. The seemingly obvious thing to do would be to add the Safari » Get Specified URLs action followed by the Safari » Display Webpages action, but this results in the pages all being opened in separate Safari windows rather than a single window with multiple tabs even with the in a new tab in the current window radio button selected in the Open links from applications option in Safari’s preferences:

Fortunately, there is a way round this and, as a bonus, it makes adding or removing websites from the list to be opened easier.

Create a new folder in the location of your choice and give it a suitable name - I named mine “Morning news” and put it in my home folder and, to make adding websites easier, I also added this folder to my dock.

Now navigate to one of the websites you want displayed each morning and drag the icon from Safari’s address bar into your newly created folder - this creates a “Web Internet Location” file which is basically a shortcut to that website. Repeat this for each website you want opened each morning. If you want to remove a website from the list, simply move its Web Internet Location file to the trash.

As Mikewake pointed out, it appears that it’s not possible to drag a site’s icon from Safari’s address bar to a folder in the dock - it must first be dropped onto the desktop and then dragged from there and dropped into the folder in the dock.

Back in Automator:

• add the Finder » Get Specified Finder Items action and add the folder you’ve just created by selecting the “+”, navigating to the folder and selecting “Open”;
• add the Finder » Get Folder Contents action;
• add the Finder » Filter Finder Items and set the criteria to File Type » Is » Internet File Location - this, confusingly, only lets through the “Web Internet Location” files we created earlier;
• add the Finder » Open Finder Items action - you can leave the Open with: drop-down list as Default Application if you wish or select a browser of your choice.

A few final touches …

Set your Mac to wake up at a specific time by going to System Preferences » Energy Saver » Schedule and selected your preferred time:

Finally, add a re-occuring event in iCal with an alarm to launch your workflow:

Update: I submitted this to Automator World and it also got picked up by Automator Actions.

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