his favorite third-party Automator downloads

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Mac OS X comes with hundreds of Automator actions to get youstarted. These actions can handle basic tasks within the operatingsystem itself, as well as in many of OS X's bundled applications,including Address Book, iCal, iTunes, Mail, and Safari. But asuseful as all of these built-in actions are, they can't doeverything.
Fortunately, third-party developers have been busy buildingAutomator actions of their own. Like the built-in actions, thesethird-party actions work with OS X itself and its bundledapplications, as well as with all kinds of other programs. Some ofthe actions come from big-name software companies (the latestversion of Microsoft Office, for example, includes some handyactions of its own), and some come from individual programmers.
Wherever you get them, these third-party actions make Automatoreven more useful than it already is. Here are a few of myfavorites. To install any of them, follow their Web links; you'llfind installation instructions there. Dispense Items Incrementally
Automator's new Loop action lets you repeat a section of yourworkflow over and over. Unfortunately, it has a glitch: if yourworkflow passes multiple files or folders to a loop, Automator willsend the entire batch through the loop all at once.
That may be fine if you're working with a small number of items.But if your workflow generates a list of hundreds or even thousandsof Finder items, and then sends them to an application, you couldfind yourself with hundreds of files open at one time. NyhthawkProductions' Dispense Items Incrementally fixes this problem by taking a batch of files as input and thenreleasing them to an Automator loop one at a time. Once all theitems have been through the loop, the action stops the workflow. Download URLs as PDFs
Saving Web pages in PDF format can be very useful. You can thenshare them with friends via e-mail, archive them for offlineviewing, or integrate them into a document. Scott Garner's Download URLs as PDFs action makes saving them simple. The action takes URLs from aprevious action (such as Get Current Web Page from Safari or GetSpecified URLs), downloads those Web pages in PDF format to aspecified folder, and outputs the downloaded files for furtherprocessing by the workflow. Within the action's preferences, youcan specify the PDF's orientation, whether it will include imagesand backgrounds, the file name, and more.