>_automatic

This is a professional development opportunity that is for any Mac, iOS or Android user. Welcome to >_Automatic - a 2 Week session that perhaps unsurprisingly focusses on automation!

Goals
Introduce ways to make your digital work/social life more efficient and walk away with some tangible 'gains'.

Who is this session for? 
People who are ready to take ordinary tasks, and automate them. It's also for the tech curious!

We therefore dive into 3 levels of automation:

Week 1

IFTTT - the innovative and clever service (brought together with the IF App for iOS and Android) links together many of your favourite social media and broader internet sites - delivering automated tasks and information retrieval. It's actually quite fun to dive into the IFTTT 'recipes', and you too can create your own. Simple to use, easy to setup. For participants in The Fish Bowl this week, we may not make it beyond IFTTT...40 mins disappears quickly in this universe.

Week 2

Automator - This native App to the Mac coordinates applescript with a tidy UI (user interface). It looks daunting at first glance, but we will guide you through some processes that will perform common tasks such as shrinking a PDF with no loss of quality; merging PDF files into a single file; converting image types; pulling text from PDF files; converting to PDF...actually the Automator options here mostly relate to PDFs. Whatever the recipe, Automator can take all the repetitive legwork out by creating automatic processes that you normally do manually.

Extension

AppleScript - Offered as an extension in this session, we offer a look at this form of programming language that is one of the simplest languages to understand, mainly because it so closely resembles regular prose. Great for people who are curious and requires no experience in scripting languages.

Some of our IF recipes from this session (watch this space...!)