Good/inspiring uses of automation on Mac OS X I have been a mac user for quite a while now (about 5-6 years) and I would consider myself rather tech-savvy. That being said I have very little insight to the automation capabilities that have been introduced to OSX a couple of years ago. There are smart folders, folder actions, and other applescripts, as far as I know. 

As I haven't come across a good tutorial, or some other resource for these new capabilities within OSX, I was wondering if people could give a couple real-life examples of how they are using these.
Smart Folders are 'virtual folders'. They're useful for automatically adding or removing items that fit certain criteria.

For example, I have a Smart Folder called 'Wallpapers'. I've made the criteria for entrance to this Smart Folder:


.png filetype
2560x1600 pixels


As such files appear (or are removed) anywhere on my system, so they'll be added to or removed from the Smart Folder.



When I'm done I can just delete the Smart Folder without deleting the files that reside inside it.

NB: The default behaviour is to add Smart Folders to the Sidebar. You can uncheck that option when you create the Smart Folder or you can simply drag the Smart Folder out of the sidebar to anywhere you wish. I've chosen the Desktop.

This link has a good overview of how they work.