With the introduction of Snow Leopard – Apple’s new operating system, many significant changes have arrived, but also some tweaks to existing functionality. In this article I’m going to give a rundown of a new and interesting ways that Automator workflows can now run within the Finder and other applications.

OS X 10.5 – Leopard

In 10.4 and 10.5 Leopard,  Automator workflows could be run within the Finder on selected files or folders. Creating them was a simple enough task – drag and drop in the familiar Automator way, and saving them as Finder workflows. To run them, you simply highlighted the files or folders you wanted to interact with, and select the sub-menu item of your custom workflow:

Automator Workflows in Finder - OS X 10.5

This worked great – if a little bit long winded when drilling down through the menu’s to take an action. What I also found was that it took a bit of time for any workflow to run, basically because OS X needed to load that workflow and its supporting code. You did get a nice bit of visual feedback though in the menu bar telling you that the workflow was running.

This has pretty much all gone in Snow Leopard 10.6.

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