Automator tutorial for dummies: Kerkythea launcher

Hi there!

I found Kerkythea the other day and I’m trying it with sketchup 6 free for MAC, so… I’m happy with it right now but the only way I had to run Kerkythea was via double clicking /Applications/Kerkythea/Kerkythea or via Terminal, and I just though… wouldn’t be cool to run Kerkythea from the dock ??. So I just went to /Applications and dragged Kerkythea binary to the Dock but… the Dock didn’t want Kerkythea in it!.

Then I began looking for a “pretty” way for running Kerkythea and I found an easy way to do it:

Ok, first, locate where is Kerkythea installed, by default it’s installed in /Applications

Ok, now we know where Kerkythea is, launch Automator (/Applications/Automator)

Automator starts asking us what kind of workflow we want, so select “Custom” and just press “choose”.

The next step is to choose an action, so just search “Run Shell Script”:

…and drop it to the right

…resulting:

Now just delete the “cat” command:

…and drag the Kerkythea binary (or application) to the blank space:

resulting:

Ok, now just save the workflow as Application:

…now change the Name of the Application:

…and press Save.

Ok, at this point, you have an (ugly) Application called Kerkythea in your pretty OSX desktop.

So… what can you do to change that ugly Icon to the Kerkythea one?…. easy, we can convert the png Kerkythea team gives us (thx btw), but as generous man I am, I did the dirty work for you… Download from here or just take a look at the end of the post .

Ok, now you got an Application which calls another Application, and an icon file, what’s next?…

Just right click on Kerkythea Icon and select “Show Package Contents”

… and copy my Kerkythea icon “Kerkythea.icns” to the /Contents/Resources Folder

As you see in the previous image, an “AutomatorApplet.icns” already exists, so just delete it and rename the “Kerkythea.icns” icon you just copied to “AutomatorApplet.icns”