Speedy Mac is an application I came across the other day using a service called prMac. Speedy Mac was crated by Altomac, a software company that has three applications available on their site currently. From reading the press release Altomac sent out, Speedy Mac is described as an application designed to speedup your workflow, it is claimed that it will open documents, applications, folders and websites. Speedy Mac is sold by Altomac for a price of $27 USD, so I download the free trial of Speedy Mac and gave it a try.

What is Speedy Mac? Well it’s a program that adds an icon to your menu bar which lists recent and favorite documents, folders, websites and applications. Clicking on an item in menu will open it, Speedy Mac’s preferences allow you to add and remove favorite items. Speedy Mac is also available as a floating strip. In addition to opening files, folders and websites Speedy Mac also has a list of Tasks, which are an assortment of pre-installed and user expandable AppleScripts and Automator workflows.

Speedy Mac overall seems to be something I would have liked to know about when I first switched to the Mac, the best way I can describe Speedy Mac is that it’s a simplified Quicksilver. What I mean by that is that Speedy Mac aims to make simple tasks simpler and quicker. Quicksilver can be a little confusing to a new Mac user, and Speedy Mac seems to simplify some of Quicksilver’s most used features.

The install process for Speedy Mac is somewhat strange, in order to take advantage of all of Speedy Mac’s features you must enable assistive devices in System Preferences, something that caught me off guard and made me question the purpose of enabling this feature. When this is enabled, Speedy Mac will “watch” the websites and files you’ve recently opened and display them as recent items. Like Quicksilver, Speedy Mac launches an icon on your dock, but unlike Quicksilver, there is no option in the Preferences to hide the dock icon.

The two images above are the application icon and a screenshot provided by Altomac, below I have some screenshots of my own. I’m not sure that Speedy Mac is worth $27 USD, a lower price and I’d be more receptive of it, if you’re willing to learn a more advanced system, a free alternative is Quicksilver, otherwise checkout the free trial of Speedy Mac. I would recommend trying Quicksilver if Speedy Mac sounds like your type of app.

More: Speedy Mac on Altomac or Press Release.
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Automator is a powerful application provided by Apple on every copy of Mac OS X. Although every Mac has Automator installed most users have never experimented with it, and that’s the goal of this article: to introduce you to Automator.

Automator is location in your Applications folder (/Applications/Automator.app), when Automator is opened you’ll get a workflow template chooser. Custom will start you off with a blank workflow, allowing you to add your own actions.

This is meant to be a simple article on Automator, and as such I’ll show the steps required to make a basic Automator workflow that will quit all of our open applications. (I use three primary Automator workflows, one to open my favorite applications (the ones I leave running), one to quit all applications, and finally one to put my Mac Pro to sleep.)

The workflow I’m showing you today will be based off of a Custom workflow. The screenshot below shows a empty workflow in Automator.

In the search box above the list of available actions type “quit” and Automator will show you a few actions, the one named Quit All Applications is the one we are interested in for this article. Drag the action Quit All Applications over to the blank workflow space on the right.

In the workflow pane you’ll notice a new action, the Quit All Applications action and that it has several options. 

Now we want to add some applications to the list for the action to skip over, that is, to not quit them. Click the Add… button and choose a few applications, I would suggest Safari if you are following along here. For my list I added Quicksilver and Safari, as example applications.

To get a little visual feedback, and assuming you have Growl installed, we are going to add an action named Show Growl Notification. Just as before, we are going to drag the item into the workflow pane to the right, position this notification under the existing Quit All Applications action. Give it a title and description.

You can test run your workflow by clicking the Run toolbar item in the top right corner of the Automator application (first make sure that you’ve added Safari to the Do not quit list). If you have Growl installed and added its action you’ll get a nice confirmation when its complete.

To save our workflow so we can open it at any time, choose Save As… from the File menu. Give it a name and choose Application for the File Format.

Once your workflow is saved, go to the folder you saved it to and launch your workflow. You’ll notice that by saving the workflow as an Application we can open it without having Automator open.

If you like the idea of having an application to quit all your open applications, you may want to edit the workflow to include Safari in the Quit All Applications action.

It’s easy to edit your Automator workflow, reopen Automator and choose the Open an Existing Workflow… option at startup. Choose your workflow from the list (the .app) and Automator will import all your actions. From now on when your editing a saved Automator application you don’t need to Save As…, simply saving the application is enough to update your workflow.

Automator and Quicksilver are a powerful combo, on my Mac Pro I used an add-on action called Sleep to quickly sleep the computer (I’ve found this easier than reaching for the power button or choosing it from the menu).

Apple also has a great getting started article on Automator, Mac 101: Automator.