If you’ve updated to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) then you’ve likely noticed that the binding between documents and the applications that created them is frequently broken.<\/p>\n
That is, create a document in BBEdit and save it to the desktop. Now double-click that document. It may open in Safari, in Textedit, in Word, or, if you’re lucky in BBEdit.<\/p>\n
This is intentional on Apple’s part; it is not a mistake. (In the pre-10.6 days, each document had a hidden type code and a hidden creator code, and the Finder used these to link between the document and its creator. That’s not being done anymore… and needless to say, that’s inconvenient.)<\/p>\n
That said, all that’s left is the document’s (sometimes) hidden suffix, such as “.txt” or “.doc” or “.html” and so on.<\/p>\n
Now you can make one program open ALL documents that end with “.txt” by highlighting the document, and pressing command-i. In the resulting GetInfo box, select the “Open with:” section; pick the application you’d like to use to open the file; and then click the “Change All…” button.<\/p>\n
But that suffers from making -all- documents that end with that suffix open in just one program… which may or may not be the application that actually created it.<\/p>\n
So, here’s what I did.<\/p>\n
First, I did go ahead and set up my “default” applications, as described above.<\/p>\n
Then, using Automator (which is the point of this article) I easily made services to open documents with a specific application.<\/p>\n
That is: I control click on the document, and from the resulting menu, choose “Services\/Preview” or “Services\/Textedit” or whatever app I want to use.<\/p>\n
For example, I generally prefer to use Acrobat to read my PDF files. However, Acrobat takes forever to print them, so if I’m printing, I want to open them in Preview (which for reasons I don’t understand, seems to print PDFs much faster.)<\/p>\n
So, using the GetInfo technique, I’ve set PDFs to open in Acrobat.<\/p>\n
Then, to make an item that will appear in the contextual menu when I control-click on a document, I ran Automator.<\/p>\n
When Automator comes up, I chose to make a new Service. (If you don’t see the choices, choose “New” from the File menu, and click on the Service icon.)<\/p>\n
Next, make sure that “Library” is highlighted in the left-most column. Then, in the next column over, find the item “Open Finder Items.”<\/p>\n
Click and hold and drag “Open Finder Items” to the large area on the right, and it will open, revealing a popup menu, which initially says “Default Application.”<\/p>\n
Using that popup menu, select the application you want to use. (If you can’t find it, there’s an “Other…” at the bottom of the menu list.)<\/p>\n
That’s it. Now just choose Save from the main file menu, and give your new service a name. (I choose “ow Acrobat” or “ow TextEdit” and so on where the “ow” simply means to me “Open With”. Pick whatever is meaningful to you.)<\/p>\n
Once you’ve named it, hit the “save” button, and you’re done. You can quit automator, or make some more “Open With…” services if you like.<\/p>\n
To use your new Service, control-click on the document in the finder, choose “Services…” and your new service.<\/p>\n
This whole process takes much longer to describe than it does to do, and once you’ve done one, you’ll find yourself doing many.<\/p>\n
Automator is a very handy tool, and very easy to use. We’ll cover more of it later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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