CarlosNZ

Couple of quick questions about Packal: Is there any way to get download stats for one's own workflows? I'd like to gauge how much interest there is in my various workflows. (With my own downloads, I track numbers with bitly shortlinks.) Is there, or will there be, an RSS feed for the site to keep track of new submissions? Thanks. Carl.

This workflow allows you to exclude specific files or folders from Time Machine backups. For regular, permanent exclusions, you can always use the Time Machine Preference Panel, but this is intended for specific, incidental items, or just convenience. For example, if you have a 2GB video file on your Desktop that you intend to delete in a few days, it doesn’t make sense to waste Time Machine space on that. So exclude it. Here’s how: Usage: The workflow will mark your excluded items with a Finder colour label to make it easy to identify them. So the first thing you must do before using it is specify a colour. (I didn’t want to set a default since people may be already using that colour for something.) Use the Alfred keyword timemachine set colour and select one of the colour labels from the list. Then, to start excluding files and folders, simply select the items you want to exclude and either: invoke the Alfred File Action “Exclude from Time Machine Backups” (can work on Finder or Alfred selections), or use the Alfred keyword exclude to act on the current Finder selection, or use the hotkey (initially Ctrl-Shift-X). You should then receive a notification and the items will be labelled your chosen colour: To undo exclusions, just reverse the operation with the keyword include, hotkey (Ctrl-Shift-I) or File Action “Include in Time Machine backups”. And that’s it. I hope you find the workflow useful. Under the Hood The workflow utilises the built-in command line program “tmutil”, which was introduced in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which means the workflow won’t work in earlier OSes I’m afraid. For more technical info about tmutil, please see Apple's Developer Reference. A Note on Mavericks Tags This workflow uses legacy “simple” Finder colour labels rather than the more sophisticated tagging system introduced in OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Consequently, it only allows for one colour label per file/folder. If you have a more complex tagging system involving labelling items with more than one colour label simultaneously, I suggest you avoid using it for now. Hopefully I will update it at some point to work with the new system, but there’s quite a bit more complexity in that so I’ll need to do some more research. Please let me know if this is important to you and I’ll get onto it. Download Time Machine Exclusions v1.0 [20 March 2014]

Hey all, I've updated the workflow to version 1.2 (Download here!) The main feature that will be useful is that it's now easy to acquire and enter your own personal API key, so we should all be able to avoid failures by exceeding the monthly free limit. Just use the keyword tinypng_getkey to get your own key and the keyword tinypng_config to enter your new key. Also, there's better error reporting so you should get a clearer reason if the workflow fails. See first post for further details. Cheers, Carl.

Okay, it's working now. Not sure what was going on. Probably my fault somehow.

Well, yes, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the workflow. It is designed to be a super-quick way to look up the times in a bunch of cities that you regularly want to check. The "live" single lookup feature is really just a bonus add-on. It works fine, but it's a whole lot slower than the saved quicklist cities. But sure, if that's what you want to do, then go right ahead.

Hi Shawn, I think Firefox is causing the problem. When I use it, after clicking "Submit" on the registration page, I just get the same page reloading with no indication as to whether or not the account has been created. (It would now appear that it hasn't.) However, I just signed up again in Safari and it seems to be working fine so far. Hope that helps. C

Hmm, nothing's happening. What am I doing wrong? Tried the Markdown-HTML filter and the bulletize filter. Using both selected text and clipboard text. On 10.9.2

Hey guys, FYI -- I think the problem with this workflow failing is due to exceeding my API key's monthly limit of 500 conversions per month. Which also explains why it started working again and then stopped again. Anyway, I'm glad people are getting so much use out of it, but obviously it's not very convenient to have it randomly stop working at a certain point each month. I think I'll update it to make the API key easily editable and then the heavy users (you must know who you are!) can register for their own key and make it work better for everyone. Hopefully I'll do this in the next few days. Cheers, Carl.

I'm getting this error too. I'm able to "reset" my password and log in via the one-time login link, but once I change my password I get back to this error. Although, I'm not convinced it's actually accepting my new changed password as there's no notification given that it has changed - it just loops back to the same form. Could you maybe try deleting my account altogether (CarlosNZ) and I'll start again with a fresh one? Thanks.

These instructions are all in the first post of this thread (and with the workflow). No, it's the other way round. The "quicklist" will require updating after DST changes, whereas arbitrary individual lookups will be "live" and should be always accurate.

The workflow calculates the difference between the requested city and your local time (as per your computer's clock) and stores it as an offset from your computer time. Are you doing a "live" lookup (ie. "tz place-not-saved"), or do you have Los Angeles stored in your quick list (ie. keyword "tz")? If the latter, then yes, the US has recently changed to DST so a refresh of saved offsets will have been required. If the former, then that result should be correct regardless. I'm not sure why you had to update last week and again today. The only thing I can think of is that it might have been a long time (ie nearly 6 months) since you last used the workflow so DST had expired, and then it was re-implemented just this last weekend. Perhaps in a future update, I'll be able to store the DST change dates with the saved cities and automatically account for it or, at the very least, remind the user to manually update. I'll see if I can find some time to have a look at that in the near future. Thanks for your input.

You only have to do it every six months, and most of the world changes to DST within a couple of weeks of each other. In fact, for live results like the one in your example, you would only need to update when YOUR location changes to or from DST. Yes, it's a little cumbersome, but that's what allows the main workflow list of cities to be so fast — the timezone offsets are stored locally. If it had to check the current offset for every saved city every time, the list would be a LOT slower.

This is almost certainly due to a daylight savings change in either your city or the city in question. Just run an update "keyword: timezone update" to refresh the workflow's list of city offsets and it should be correct again. (FYI, LA is showing up as PST for me.) Cheers.

Hey guys, I've just tried this again and my version is working fine again. Please make sure you've updated to v1.1 from the link at the top of this thread. Let me know if you're still experiencing problems. Cheers, Carl.

Hey guys, sorry for the lack of communication. I haven't forgotten about this -- just been really busy. I'll have a look at the problem in the next day or so and get back to you. Hopefully it'll be a small fix. Cheers, Carl.

You can actually just select the files you want in the Finder, then use the "File Selection" hotkey to show it in Alfred: I've changed mine from the default, but you can find the hotkey in the Preferences under Features->File Search->Actions. Cheers.

Yeah, fair enough. It should be a fairly simple change. I'll look into this week and try and get something out. Cheers.

Hey folks, I've updated the workflow to use the new API. Let me know how it's going for you. Hopefully there's no problems. Download here! (The workflow will also now work as a regular keyword, where it will act on the current Finder selection, as well as a File Action.) Not at this stage. Might be a nice idea for a later version, but it's currently fairly simple to just open the folder and select all the files, isn't it? P.S. - There is a limit of 500 PNGs a month for free usage of the API. Depending on how heavily this workflow gets used, I may have to look at getting users to acquire and input their own API keys in future. We'll see how it goes.

Yes -- they have released a new version of the TinyPNG API. I'll try and get a chance to update the workflow in the next few days. Hopefully by the weekend, so stand by. Glad to hear you're finding it useful. Cheers, Carl.

Hey there, I think there might be some kind of permission error with one of the working folders. Can you check the write permissions of "/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Caches/com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred-2/Workflow Data" make sure it and all subfolders are write-enabled? You might also have to reset the workflow ("timer nuke") to get it going again. That did the trick for me. Let me know how it goes. Cheers, C

Yep, I've noticed this too. Will look into it and get back to you. Hopefully it's nothing too difficult to fix. C

Cool, good to know.

Yeah, that's something I was hoping to implement at some point, but I haven't got round to it yet. Thanks for the reminder, and now I know there's some interest, I'll try and get on to adding this feature soon. Cheers.

Hi there, the default keyword for adding a new location is "timezone add", not "tz add". So, try "timezone add Tampa". (Or you can just start typing "timezone", then select "New City" from the results list when it appears.)

I just tried it on a bunch of screenshots and it was working fine. Is it still malfunctioning for you?