Turning off and on app in automator

You need more than Automator.

You need to create a LaunchCtl plist that will activate at the time you want.

You could use it to call an Automator workflow that uses an Applescript Action to run the app and to quit the app.

tell application "Pages" to open

tell application "Pages" to quit

Lingon is a good app to use to create launchCtl items.

Here's some examples of how to do it manually.

http://alvinalexander.com/mac-os-x/launchd-examples-launchd-plist-file-examples- mac

For the run command, you can use

open -a AppName

To quit, you have to call Applescript using osascript (although there might be another way):

osascript -e "ignoring application responses" -e "tell application \"AppName\" to quit with saving" -e "end ignoring"

Use Launch Application and Quit Application. They are in the Utilities library.

Note that you can repeate each of those in the same workflow to open (quit) many apps at once.

1) I had never looked into Calendar Alerts in Automator before you asked (hence my confusion). One guess I have is that it sends a Notification. Since you only need this on your Mac, put the event in an ON MY MAC calendar. Mine was automatically created there, so it didn't go to my iCloud devices.

If you don't have an ON MY MAC calendar, the only way I've found to create one is to turn on the Birthdays calendar in the preferences, select it from the list of Calendars, then right-click below it and select New Calendar.

The Automator Action actually created an Automator Calendar for me.

2) I don't know if that is possible.