Task Till Dawn Is a Simple Automation Tool for Windows and Mac
Scheduling your computer to do something every day, every time you log in, or every time the screen wakes up isn’t impossible on most computers, it’s just inconvenient. Task Scheduler in Windows and Automator for macOS work if you’re willing to dig in, but there’s a learning curve.
Task Till Dawn (which I found through App Addict ) is a free app for Windows and macOS created by developer Oliver Matuszyn that you can use to set up your own automation for everything from running a backup to changing your desktop wallpaper.
To get started, download the application and launch it. You can start creating automation right now. The automation tool designer consists of four main sections. Metadata allows you to provide a name and description for your automation; Actions define what the automation does.
Automation setup mainly occurs on the “Actions” tab. The two left panels show the different capabilities of your automation, while the right panel shows the steps you currently have configured.
The next two tabs, Schedule and Events , allow you to choose when the automation will run. The schedule is self-explanatory: you can trigger automation based on time. This could mean a frequency, such as every two hours, or a precise time, such as 10 a.m. every day.
But you can also trigger automation based on events , which is more interesting to me. This allows you to do things like trigger automations when certain events occur, such as waking up your computer or connecting a new hard drive.
The fun thing here is to experiment and see what you can build. For example, I wanted a Time Machine backup to run on my Mac every time I plugged in a backup drive (named “88MPH”). Configured automation using the “When inserting volumes or connecting disks” event. I then set up an automation to get the names of the mounted drives and only proceed if one of them matches my drive name. If the drive matches, the Time Machine backup begins.
There’s a lot more you can do here. The installation folder contains several pre-built workflows to perform tasks such as automatically capturing photos from your camera and loudly announcing the time every hour. Studying them is a great way to get a feel for what is possible. However, the fun part is trying to build something yourself.