Yosemite-esque Cards

[rice.shawn]

First, I'll say that I'm not sure how feasible this would be, but...

 

I really like how the new Spotlight shows the list of results to the left and a quicklook/card to the right. I can see this being very useful in script filters. Unfortunately, I don't think it would be possible to implement wholesale across Alfred. But we could, in a script filter, indicate that a card show be shown (this would be a global for the script filter) and then describe the content in the "card" for each result. I'm not sure if that would mean that we'd have the option to use quicklook for a document or render a map or just have some structured text appear, or a mix of both, but, regardless, it would be hella useful. Like, for the Spotify workflows, it could show the cover and some more meta-data about the track. For a translation workflow, it could show an extended translation or some synonyms or something. Some of this might be possible if the card field was just wrapped in a CDATA tag.

[Florian]

I like this idea, but i think it would (often but not always) mean longer response times (loading an image, downloading more data...). Thus this should only happen if it finally is possible to:

- have dynamic results (they display as soon as they are ready and not the whole list at once)

- kill a script (when you type a N character query, a script starts for the first character and might slow down the N character query).

[rice.shawn]

Well, the card could be loaded only when selected, which would make things go faster.

 

The whole structure of the script filter would have to be changed in order to have dynamic results (i.e. move toward something other than XML), but if the card is a "special" pane, then it could be triggered when it is highlighted, and so for anything that would take longer to render (pictures, maps...) that would be the only thing that would be loaded dynamically, which would reduce the amount of changed needed to Alfred's support of workflows.

[vitor]

Not all script filters require a network connection, so this would work fine for those without it noticeably slowing down. Better handling of script filters is something we’ve been asking for for quite some time, though, and as much as I like this idea, I’d like to see the current issues being addressed first. Spotlight can also present a lot of information, currently, so I’m guessing it’d be quite a task to implement that, and seeing as Andrew is also busy with Alfred Remote at the moment (can’t say I’m excited about that), I very much doubt we’ll see that soon. Would very much like to be wrong on that front, though.

[Florian]

Is there a thread that sums up all requests for "better handling of script filters"?

[Andrew]

I have some pretty special ideas for the future of Alfred and how things are displayed, so stay tuned