In a typical day, I use Preview and PDFpenPro multiple times per hour. Since I use Preview more than half the time to simply look at PDFs, I have my Mac set up to open PDFs in Preview by default.

But I need PDFpenPro a lot, too, and I've been sick of going through the cluttered Open With contextual menu with my mouse/trackpad.

So I made a simple OS X service in Automator that opens any PDF I've selected in Finder (or Path Finder) with PDFpenPro 6. The service is triggered by a keyboard shortcut to make it even faster.

Sometimes I forget how much time I can save by spending a few seconds to make simple Automator services.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="620.0"]<img src="/img/pdfpen6-automator-pe.png" alt="The Automator Service"/> The Automator Service[/caption] 
  


  
   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="418.0"]<img src="/img/pdfpen-shortcut-pe.png" alt="The Keyboard Shortcut"/> The Keyboard Shortcut[/caption]