What's most important about Automator is that all of this is done in an extremely simple and easy-to-use manner. The workflow that I've just described can be even more complicated, taking the scaled images and doing pretty much whatever you'd like with them - you can even nest workflows inside of other workflows to achieve even more robust results.
You can then feed all of those images that you've just downloaded into another action that scales all images to a certain size. With all of the image URLs, you can then feed them into another action to download all of the images to a specific folder. For example, one of the actions that ships with Tiger is an action to get all image URLs from a web page in Safari. Automator allows you to create a workflow of actions, with each action performing specific tasks on its inputs and passing it along to the next action. To the end user, Automator is basically a drag-'n-drop batch job generator that happens to be very flexible. With Automator, Apple has taken many of the types of tasks that you can accomplish using AppleScript and made them infinitely more user friendly. With Dashboard, Apple has taken many of the features of Sherlock - a rarely used and rarely talked about tool in Panther, and re-packaged them in a much more user friendly environment that is Dashboard. One underlying theme of features like Automator and Dashboard in Tiger is to take functionality that was essentially present in Panther, and make it something that's accessible and actually used by the masses in Tiger. Tiger brings another tool to the table that can work either with or in lieu of AppleScript for those who aren't interested in learning the language, and that tool is called Automator. I never seemed to have enough time to sit down and become comfortable enough with the language, regardless of how much easier it would make my life. Despite its relative ease of use, I hardly ever found myself using AppleScript to get things done. One feature that's always intrigued me about OS X is how powerful yet fairly accessible of a scripting language AppleScript happens to be.
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