Automatically Open Multiple Websites, Part 1

Updated December 18th, 2015.

(There’s nothing I like better than saving people time and trouble by showing them a better way to use their Macs. These simple AppleScripts will save you time and trouble day after day after day.)

I am willing to bet that you have a bunch of websites that you look at every day.

Let’s pretend that every morning you have a look at Time Magazine, Google News, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Even if you use a bookmark for each site there’s enough mousing around that just opening the sites takes a measurable amount of time. It might not be much, but it all counts. And, you actually have to do the work– it doesn’t happen unless you do the work.

What if you could click a single item in your Dock and have all four of your news websites open, each in its own window, in a nice neat stack on your screen? Wouldn’t that be cool?

Of course that would be cool. And, it’s totally doable. In fact, I’ve done it for you, along with two variations (one for Mac-related news sites, and one for sports news). I did it with AppleScript, a very powerful feature of the Mac OS, available on every Mac.

Click to download the AppleScripts. You’ll get a disk image. (If you’re using Safari the disk image will probably open automatically. If not, or if you’re using Firefox, look in your Downloads folder for something called “URL_AppleScripts.dmg” and double-click it.)

Eventually you’ll see the three items shown below. They’re AppleScript Applications. Double-click each one to see what it does. Drag the ones you like to your Applications folder. Then, from there (that is, from in the Applications folder), drag them to the Dock. Now a single click in the Dock will trigger a multi-page masterpiece.

Of course you are probably thinking it would be even better if the sites that opened were the ones YOU liked, not the ones I like. That’s easy to do, and I’ll write that up sometime soon. If you’re in a hurry, tell me and I’ll help you out right away.

In the meantime– isn’t this neat? One click opens four websites, neatly, quickly, efficiently. Who could ask for more?

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