Jump to content

bbrown

Member
  • Posts

    9
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by bbrown

  1. Excellent, that'll work for the emoji side. (I promise I searched the forums for "emoji" before suggesting.) I guess I'll do a search for a workflow along the lines of the Key Caps suggestion. Thanks! Bill
  2. Mojibar looks like a nice little utility but my toolbar's getting pretty packed and I only use emoji occasionally. I wonder if there might be some way to integrate this functionality into Alfred, maybe with the :searchTerm syntax and a press of return to copy to clipboard? Heck, something even like the old Key Caps utility would be good enough for me. I can never remember the key combinations and I'm often copying these various characters from previous usages. Just an idea, not a big deal. Bill
  3. I just created my own workflow and then thought, "Hey I should check the Alfred forum." But mine's a slight improvement because I wanted something that just toggled hidden and unhidden states at a hotkey. Here's the modified shell script: desktop=$(ls -lO ~/Desktop) if grep -q "hidden" <<< $desktop; then chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/* else chflags hidden ~/Desktop/* fi It's pretty quick and not having to remember an argument to pass in makes things easier. Bill
  4. This is outstanding and the migration page is exactly what I would have wanted. Thank you very much! Bill
  5. I was trying to be helpful to your small shop. In my professional life, someone taking the time to patiently explain a complaint and offer a simple solution (adding a page linked off of Support is not a two-month endeavor and can take place concurrently with all the finishing touches) is a gift. Getting defensive and pooh-poohing that gift is exactly the wrong way to handle things. Instead of a "you're right, we didn't want to expend the time and effort to make a full migration possible but thanks for the suggestion of a migration page we'll look into that" you shot back with "everyone loves us" and "you guys are outliers in your problems." You are 100% correct in saying that it wasn't worth two months of delay and that it only affected people with heavy customization. No one is arguing with either of those statements. If you had had a notice saying that the migration workflow was it and that there would be some minor manual work to get the rest into v2, this thread would not exist. I'd have been annoyed at the extra work created by a great productivity tool but I'm not against it as such if I had known upfront (or near front) that it was there. That's the lesson here for v3: communicate with your loyal users where they can reasonably expect you to communicate and nearly everything's palatable. You can choose to take heed of that or you can shoot the messenger. I'm done trying to get you to see this. I will be manually migrating everything this weekend and I look forward to getting to know these vaunted new features. Bill
  6. I'm going to spell this out for you because I can't believe how obtuse you're being about this. (Note also that I have a tremendous amount of respect for you and your software. I've purchased LaunchBar in the past and was a die-hard power user of Quicksilver until Alfred came along. Your user interface in v1 was brilliant and utterly intuitive.) When I read in The Verge that v2 was out of beta. I immediately went to the site to download it. I was expecting something on the front page indicating "hey v1 user, here's how you get v2." What I got instead was nothing at all. I thought, "hey maybe I should just download it." So I clicked on the download link and finally saw something for v1, which was about getting upgrade pricing for the Power Pack. I knew that I'd want that so I went ahead and bought it. By then my download had finished, so I ran Alfred. Huh, looks exactly the same. Went to /Applications and saw "Alfred 2." I thought that was strange, but I'm easy-going. I started it and looked through the preferences that come up. Everything's empty and even my minor choices weren't observed. So I go to Alfred support. No mention there, no search results, nothing. Okay, maybe it's in the forum. Click over there and there was one thread about upgrading (at the time). I read through all of that and the last reply was from 2/28. It was from David Ferguson and it was from the beta period. He said that maybe they'd come up with a migration workflow to include in the final release. No link to his personal blog, no indication that it made it into the final release. At this point, I realized I was entirely on my own and wrote my posts. Later in the day David Ferguson linked to his workflow, which is very handy. I received your defensive responses about how different all of these settings are and how human intelligence is necessary to manually copy the extensions over because then we can really re-evaluate whether we're using the full power of the Workflow. (If you guys had just copied them in and gave me an alert that they probably needed some tweaking, I promise I would've done that. I've been doing Web applications for 14 years now and I have done quite a few migrations--heck, I even merged two separate applications into one and handled all of the data importing--so please spare me about how it couldn't have been done, especially when you also point out that you were completely rewriting the application. 80% migration and punting on the really dodgy pieces would have spared me this whole unpleasantness and the coming manual waste of time.) My points are that I shouldn't have had to work this hard to a) find out that automatic migration wasn't possible, figure out that dfreg.us is a member of the Alfred team, and c) discern that his migration workflow is the official tool. If there had been a migration page, which could not have delayed the launch by more than a day if at all, then I could have gone there, downloaded the workflow, and read how you've punted on helping me with any other pieces. That is what I meant by "bad form." Bill
  7. I've got 10 scripts, 8 AppleScripts, and 7 global hotkeys plus all of the settings customizations. I am going to have Alfred and Alfred 2 open simultaneously and visually go through each of these (plus test them out) to make them match assuming that I don't have to comb through your help or wait for forum support to find things that don't obviously match between versions. My usage data ("Since January 28, 2011, Alfred has been used 12,440 times. Average 16.0 times per day.") is gone. Multiply that experience by 10% of your customer base (guesstimate of how many customized to that extent beyond your snippets/searchs workflow migrator) and you've got a lot of unpaid wasting of customers' time. It's obviously cheaper to you than having a developer build in a migration plan from the get-go but it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. If you pull this crap in v3, I will not be paying again and will go back to Quicksilver. As a side note, putting that custom searches migration workflow in a forum reply and linking to a guy's blog is bad form. That tool would be immensely useful to anyone that had custom searches and snippets. Why couldn't you have put it somewhere within the tool itself or off the upgrade page. Or heck, have an upgrade to v2 page linked off support? (I've been an Alfred user for two years and I have personally gotten at least three people passionately hooked on Alfred in that time and an unknown number advocating on Twitter and elsewhere. v2 feels rushed to market and Running with Crayons seems less customer-focused than it has in the past. Take that for what it's worth.) Bill
  8. So is that the last, official word here? Snippets and custom searches can be migrated but everything else I mentioned (AppleScripts, settings themselves, hotkeys, extensions) are left up to the customer to tediously migrate? I'm a software developer myself and it seems bizarre to me that a migration path wasn't part of the original design. Bill
  9. I've got tons of hotkeys set up, AppleScripts mapped, extensions added, and other minor customizations done like custom searches. From what I gather, migration from v1 to v2 wasn't a priority and we're told that there might be a one-time workflow created to accomplish this. I was an early adopter of Alfred, bought the first Power Pack, and immediately bought the v2 one as soon as I heard. I'm supposed to dutifully migrate each hotkey from the simple interface in Alfred v1 over to the Workflow system in v2? Forget all of the extensions I had before and search for new workflows? Manually and tediously copy over my AppleScripts? I'm looking over the "Templates" in Workflows and it took me two tries to find one to make a global hotkey open an app. The old interface was drop-dead simple: drag app into the Global Hotkey pane, pick a hotkey, and finished. It was delightful. Long story short, I am *not* manually importing all this. Figure this out or I'm getting a refund. Bill
×
×
  • Create New...