I'll have to watch the keynote address before I can get too excited about Automator, though. From eyewitness descriptons, it sounds like it's much more like Photoshop's Actions scheme than like a "macro recorder", which is what I actually want. So perhaps YoupiKey and iKey will survive after all.

Even then, you have to "program" the key to do what you want. MacroMaker was great. Click record, do your stuff, click stop, name it and your done! You even had a little menu icon to choose it later. What a beauty!

Sounds great. The original reason I sought such a utility was so that I could import an animation to Flash 5. I had toon-rendered some animation frames, and needed to import each, run Trace Bitmap on it, with custom trace settings, then move to the next frame and repeat -- oh, about 300 times. YoupiKey allowed me to record the mouse clicks, button clicks, and typed-in settings, then allowed me to specify how many times I wanted my new "macro" to run. I set it for the number of frames in my animation, then went home to bed. That's the kind of automation I'm looking for: I tell you what to do, and you do it, over and over. That, and undo, are the reasons I love computers.

Interesting XBench comparison..
 

http://www.geekpatrol.ca/archives/20...pantherand.php

Particularly interesting is the question asked by the first poster ("Aaron Drake"), about testing on a non-64bit architecture.

the nature of Automator
 

Automator may not be a macro recorder as many here seem to wish; but to me it's sounding more and more like something quite powerful and accessible. Have ya'll seen this article on MacScripter?

Good article. And yes, most likely holding on to my iKey application would be a good idea. I am hoping that Automator will be able to change Creation and Modification dates. I would also like it to automatically insert metadata so Spotlight can locate specific photos and audio in my archive.