zeitlings

Hey,
 
I am working on the next evolution of the workflow. The major changes involve the addition of an agenda, the possibility to create new events using natural language, improvements of the week view and an overall redesign. For now, the search function stays true to what it was, except that it is handled internally.
 
I'm announcing this, because I'm looking for some of you to beta test the workflow as I'm somewhat pushing the limits of what can be achieved with Alfred's plain text result items, and would appreciate knowing that it works well on different machines with different configurations. 
 
For the potential beta tester:
I am using the same tricks to right-align the icons that I use to create the tidy block calendar, and would like to know if the layout of the results (e.g. a listed calendar event) succeeds with your custom theme and configuration. One of the key challenges is to present all the relevant information clearly, given Alfred's limitations in displaying data, without making the view feel cluttered and distracting.  I'd like to get your feedback on how well this works, and your suggestions on how to possibly improve the views. Especially the agenda.  I'd also like you to test the new features and let me know if they (a) work for you as expected, (b) are intuitive for you or not, (c) are buggy in any way or broken due to your locale. Permissions authentication has changed recently, and I am wondering if you are having problems granting access to your calendars, and if so, how you may have resolved them. Note that the workflow requires Apple's SF Symbols to be installed for the icons to show.
Please let me know if you're interested!
 
 
Here are some previews:
 



(Creating an event, you can adjust the day using > and <, as well as the time using + and -)

Hey,
 
I am working on the next evolution of the workflow. The major changes involve the addition of an agenda, the possibility to create new events using natural language, improvements of the week view and an overall redesign. For now, the search function stays true to what it was, except that it is handled internally.
 
I'm announcing this, because I'm looking for some of you to beta test the workflow as I'm somewhat pushing the limits of what can be achieved with Alfred's plain text result items, and would appreciate knowing that it works well on different machines with different configurations. 
 
For the potential beta tester:
I am using the same tricks to right-align the icons that I use to create the tidy block calendar, and would like to know if the layout of the results (e.g. a listed calendar event) succeeds with your custom theme and configuration. One of the key challenges is to present all the relevant information clearly, given Alfred's limitations in displaying data, without making the view feel cluttered and distracting.  I'd like to get your feedback on how well this works, and your suggestions on how to possibly improve the views. Especially the agenda.  I'd also like you to test the new features and let me know if they (a) work for you as expected, (b) are intuitive for you or not, (c) are buggy in any way or broken due to your locale. Permissions authentication has changed recently, and I am wondering if you are having problems granting access to your calendars, and if so, how you may have resolved them. Note that the workflow requires Apple's SF Symbols to be installed for the icons to show.
Please let me know if you're interested!
 
 
Here are some previews:
 



(Creating an event, you can adjust the day using > and <, as well as the time using + and -)

This is really great. I've loved my pal Tot but this may make us part company!
 
 

Wow @zeitlings. I've been thinking about this very use case and came up with a way less elegant solution with a list filter. I have two small requests if they don't cause too much of a headache.....   Would it be possible to establish a location for the files instead of the path of the workflow? I like to keep my text files in a path that i can access remotely on my other devices on the go. For example,  I would like to have a folder for these files on dropbox etc. Secondly, i would love to be able to change the extension to .txt as well like Note Taker allows.  
 
And lastly your creative output and @pseudometa's is pretty incredible. So thanks to you both as we all reap the rewards of your hard work.
 
 
 
 

Haha, many thanks, but my input for this one was rather modest, to be frank – QuickPad was literally a quick-and-dirty workflow cobbled together in 2 minutes to try out the new Text View.
 
zeitlings implementation with cycling through the pads is much smarter

Ready to go! 
 
 
That's what I thought this one would be, too, only that it kind of escalated in complexity quickly. 😄
 

Ready to go! 
 
 
That's what I thought this one would be, too, only that it kind of escalated in complexity quickly. 😄
 

Ready to go! 
 
 
That's what I thought this one would be, too, only that it kind of escalated in complexity quickly. 😄
 

Quickly access up to 9 ephemeral scratchpads for spontaneous note-taking.
🟡 🟠 🔴 🟣 🔵 🟢

With this workflow I'm adopting the Tot approach, deliberately limiting the available workspaces to keep things simple and avoid distracting overhead. It is intended as a lightweight and flexible scratchpad for frictionless ad-hoc note-taking, brainstorming, prototyping, temporary to-do lists, jotting down thoughts, sketching ideas, instantly responding to new information as it emerges, and anything else that requires a notepad in a moment's notice. 
 
Setup
 
Define the two keyboard shortcuts, e.g.  ⌘⌥P  for the primary and  ⌘⌥⌃P  for the secondary entry point.
Usage
Press the keyboard shortcut to open the scratchpad that was last used.
Press the keyboard shortcut again or  ⎋  to dismiss the scratchpad without saving.  ⌘⏎  to save your changes¹  ⇧⏎  to preview as rendered markdown  ⌥⏎  to view all pads and search your notes²  ⌘⇧⏎  to cycle through your scratchpads  
Press the secondary keyboard shortcut or enter the workflow's keyword (default:  sps ) to open a list of all scratch pads and the search mask.
 



 
Notes: 
¹ Changes are also saved when previewing and when switching the active pad.
² When searching for a pad containing a keyword, the first matching line is used as subtitle. Press  ⌘L  to view the matched line as large type.
• Also, kudos to Quickpad!
 
 

Hey @sepulchra, thanks for the kind words. I don't think it should be too much of a problem to fit in your requests 🤗

Thanks, though I've found a way already without introducing any friction! 😄 Now the standard entry behaviour can be selected in the configuration and it works exactly as before. Apart from additions to the markdown view, the magic happens with some minor manipulation of the view's configuration on the fly.
I'll do some more testing and share it later.

Quickly access up to 9 ephemeral scratchpads for spontaneous note-taking.
🟡 🟠 🔴 🟣 🔵 🟢

With this workflow I'm adopting the Tot approach, deliberately limiting the available workspaces to keep things simple and avoid distracting overhead. It is intended as a lightweight and flexible scratchpad for frictionless ad-hoc note-taking, brainstorming, prototyping, temporary to-do lists, jotting down thoughts, sketching ideas, instantly responding to new information as it emerges, and anything else that requires a notepad in a moment's notice. 
 
Setup
 
Define the two keyboard shortcuts, e.g.  ⌘⌥P  for the primary and  ⌘⌥⌃P  for the secondary entry point.
Usage
Press the keyboard shortcut to open the scratchpad that was last used.
Press the keyboard shortcut again or  ⎋  to dismiss the scratchpad without saving.  ⌘⏎  to save your changes¹  ⇧⏎  to preview as rendered markdown  ⌥⏎  to view all pads and search your notes²  ⌘⇧⏎  to cycle through your scratchpads  
Press the secondary keyboard shortcut or enter the workflow's keyword (default:  sps ) to open a list of all scratch pads and the search mask.
 



 
Notes: 
¹ Changes are also saved when previewing and when switching the active pad.
² When searching for a pad containing a keyword, the first matching line is used as subtitle. Press  ⌘L  to view the matched line as large type.
• Also, kudos to Quickpad!
 
 

Here it is. Look at the _spawnSearchJob() function in hn.sh -- hope it is somewhat self explanatory but happy to answer questions. (I am also pretty sure there's probably a better way to solve this)
 
https://github.com/luckman212/alfred-hnsearch
 

I misread the second post at first, thought you hadn’t come up with something, and coded a quick idea. I’m curious to see what you came up with but since I already made it and it’s only an example and not a full workflow, I’m sharing it anyway for reference.

The first thing I’d recommend is checking if you really need the full script to run in the background. It might be that you can get huge speed gains by making a section of it run in parallel. In an older version of Short Films, before the Grid View existed, the user’s machine would do all the processing of downloading thumbnail images then crop them. The first versions of this were slow and as part of the workflow I added a launchd agent to do the operation periodically¹. But then I backgrounded just the download and crop tasks and the speed boost was massive, to the point the agent wasn’t that important². I never investigated this thoroughly, but I bet the sequential web requests were the bottleneck. When you get a file from a server you’re not just waiting for the data to download, there’s also time taken to do a handshake and negotiate the secure connection. These add up. When sending each task to the background, multiple connections could start at the same time, reducing the delay³.

But let’s say the code is already as fast as can be. Another approach is to use two objects (⤓ Example Workflow). You’re already having to save data and read it anyway, and Alfred objects can fork to any number of other objects, so there’s no reason you have to run the slow code and display the information in the same object. This has the added benefit that termination of your “view” object (the Script Filter) does not necessarily mean terminating the slow script, allowing you to quit and return later to see more data as it is available.
 

¹ An approach I still use with some workflows where you want the data to be cached even before you run the workflow.

² The current workflow doesn’t use it at all, but the approach in general is quite different.

³ If doing this today, I’d try to optimise it even further by having curl download every file in the same connection instead of creating multiple.

I did. I opened an issue internally to look into further. Regarding the copy, it’s reproducible only when filtering is off.

I'll use the occasion to integrate a few more browsers 😄
 
Default Browser v1.3.1
- adds Orion
- adds SigmaOS
- adds Ghost Browser
 
Should be updated on the gallery soon, too. No need to download from Github.

Thanks for your wonderful workflow. I use it to switch between Safari, Arc, Firefox and Ghost browser. I was able to add Ghost browser using you bundle identifier and manually modify the appropiate files (info.plist, list.sh) and add an icon.

I'll use the occasion to integrate a few more browsers 😄
 
Default Browser v1.3.1
- adds Orion
- adds SigmaOS
- adds Ghost Browser
 
Should be updated on the gallery soon, too. No need to download from Github.

Thank you for the workflow!
Cos of you - i upgraded to Alfred 5 so I can make use of your nifty feature
 
TLDR; In case someone is reading and like to know why should you regularly change web browser ?
It's part of compartmentalization principle of keeping things together...
In this case, 1 web browser is for work (so all web browsing history and suggestions are from my work related internal webpages) and another web browser for something else..

v1.2.0 implements the new grid view for the color history
 

indeed 😄

these pdf workflows look great!

Compress PDF documents.
Usage
Either invoke the workflow by using the keyword (default: pdfcompress) and locate a PDF, or send a PDF to the workflow's "Compress PDF Document" File Action.
A compression preset can be selected by pressing ⌥ before proceeding with ↩.
File Filter

↩ Proceed to compress the PDF using the default strategy. ⌥↩ Select a compression preset. File Action

↩ Proceed to compress the PDF using the default strategy. ⌥↩ Select a compression preset. Compression Presets

↩ Proceed to compress the PDF using the selected strategy.  
The result will be a compressed document in the same location as the source PDF file.
Dependencies
With Homebrew install Ghostscript: brew install gs

Well, by setting `"type": "file:skipcheck"`, I’m able to collect URLs in the file buffer and send them to actions that accept multiple strings, which pretty much meets my needs. But the double slashes in the strings are all replaced with single ones. I suppose this wouldn’t affect file paths since there’re normally no double slashes in file paths. But if this could be fixed then the file buffer will also work for URLs (even though it wasn’t designed to do so).

@vitor
 
I think this is an important need so that export speed can be improved.
 
Thanks.