When I first heard about Automator, it sounded wonderful, but when I got a chance to actually use it, it was a bit of a let-down. Automator was just too simple and limited for my needs. Every time I tried to create a workflow, I felt like I was experiencing the programmer's equivalent of riding around in a bumper car.
But thanks to various Mac OS X Hints, such as this one, I've learned that Automator is actually very well suited for extending the Finder with new capabilities. For example, Java developers like myself often need to extract the contents of a JAR file. Here's how to use Automator to create a Finder plug-in that does just that:
cd `dirname "$1"`
mkdir `basename "$1" .jar`
cd `basename "$1" .jar`
jar xf "$1"
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050916045108565