mjwalfreds

Hi all! It's been a while since I last posted about Pacmax and I wanted to circle back on some of the most recent changes I've pushed since then. I've focused a lot more on presenting the creators of the Alfred repositories and improving the overall styles throughout the site. I want to add that I am continuously grateful for all of your feedback—it's been real helpful. Please keep it coming! If you'd like to check it out it's at https://pacmax.org/ Without further ado, here's what's new on Pacmax: Mar 30, 2019 Just added: Sort by Last Updated 📅 Added: "You might also like..."—Now you'll see suggestions on the bottom of posts on Pacmax. I thought it would be nice, and a great way to become introduced to new packages. Improved: Odd & end style improvements Mar 8, 2019 Added: GitHub Star Count in Posts Added: Sort by GitHub Stars in Explore page (from most to least) Improved: Tidied up the way info is displayed in the header of posts—now it takes up less space! Improved: Odd & end style improvements Mar 7, 2019 Added: Tooltip descriptor to help explain download & import options Improved: Removed Pagination options from top of pages Fixed: Odd and end style improvements Mar 6, 2019 Added: Support for GitHub Releases! Now Pacmax will fetch from repositories with Releases and provide an option to download the release, zipped! Improved: Removed a bunch of white space Improved: Hide the Explore page title Improved: Replaced the old serif font with Crimson Text Improved: Added better conditionals for displaying download options

Hi again all! Just wanted to follow up on a few improvements I've made to Pacmax with your feedback. Have even more in the works for hopefully later this week that should be even more exciting. Here's what's new, though: - Added: Created By field on posts (links to the author's GitHub profile) - this might be my favorite addition - Added: A scroll to top button for long pages - Fixed: Rewrote About page to help better explain different aspects related to PM & Alfred; also created a GitHub repo for anyone interested in helping make About better! - Fixed: Styled README section of posts make clearer that they're from the project's repository - Added: Support for wider screens on Explore (fill it up!) - Fixed: Pagination on Explore - Fixed: Last Updated field displaying wrong time - Improved: Several styles across the site Check out the changes at https://pacmax.org/ Thanks! P.S. Great reading all the conversations here. I look forward to more!

I am planning to prioritize the actual .alfred file types, but also have the releases available for download as well. What do you think? Respectfully, I didn't say I won't support monorepos, only that I'd focus on GitHub Releases first. By having Pacmax look at Releases I believe I'd be doing the opposite of being the one to manually add the .alfred file types; PM is going to be doing the heavy lifting. I also didn't say that Pacmax would only ever look at GitHub. It just seems like a great place (if not the best place) to start, to me anyway. If it helps: The Share form is not any sort of core functionality. It's more or less a way for people to communicate what packages they'd like to see on the site while I was getting the ball rolling (namely getting the site to be a more lean experience altogether). Automation has always been on my mind, but it was important for me to get feedback from the start. I'm glad I did because without the community's feedback I wouldn't know what to tackle next (and it has helped a lot). Your concerns don't escape me, and I respect them, however this is a very new project and I hope anyone interested in it can see that I am only just scratching the surface. So to reiterate, I'm not discounting building beyond GitHub—it just feels like a great place to start (and I've got to start somewhere). I'm also not expecting to be manually managing the site much longer; that's not realistic—but I maybe didn't make that clear. I hope that better explains my position. All the best, Max

Hey again all! To answer more of your replies (apologies if they're not necessarily all in the right order): Sorry, didn't mean to dodge this. I don't have plans to right now, but potentially someday? Absolutely! Never say never. Love it! Thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely be incorporating this and will circle back once I have. Thanks for sharing that, noted! I think I've got a solution that'll do just the trick. You are both absolutely right. I was naive on that front going into this and the last few days has been very enlightening; you've helped me to think about this very differently. I will be sure to report any malicious code so that the Alfred team can block it at the greatest level. I have a few ideas and will follow up here in the forums if something works as well as I'd like. I've been convinced by several comments here, namely that having Pacmax laser in on Releases would be a most clean & beneficial implementation; I hope to have this live and be pulling from Releases very soon. @deanishe, I've been working on this over the last day or so and think I have a great solution to everything you last mentioned. I agree with all of it, and I'm excited to post the changes. Briefly, they are my adding a Created By [GitHub Username] which acts as a link to that user's GH profile, styling for the READMEs (we were on a similar wavelength with the lines: I have been working on a sort of card style for this that I think makes it much clearer), as well as other updates which I've already made (namely links to the GitHub repository of the post, and clearer language across the site for the different available buttons). It's still a work in progress, but again, excited to push more before long! Understandably, and I hope that the most recent and upcoming changes address that. As always, thanks all, and I hope this has been helpful (as your feedback remains to be). Cheers, Max

Hi again all! Sorry for the late reply, again. Frankly, my sleep schedule is 💩. I need to work on that. @deanishe, re: PayPal - One idea I've had is making it so that repos with PayPal URLs, eg https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=[...], display a button to make it clearer to the reader that it's an option. This could be a way to continue on the no-accounts-necessary path. What do you think? I haven't, but I've got it now and will use it for this reply. It looks great, kudos @vitor. I'm glad that I'm not alone in not digging the editor. You're absolutely right. I had noticed this in another instance; we're only able to grab the entire repo as it stands—I've added it to my todo list! @vitor, to answer your points 3 & 4: Re: This is a great question and I apologize for having missed it. Put briefly, I have no interest in curating the site. My #1 concern with submissions has been digging into the repos to try to confirm that the files aren't malicious for the end-user. Beyond that, I believe diversity is good, and my whole goal here has been to try and make sharing and finding workflows easier on everyone. 2 things come to mind for me on this: 1) I want to be clearer about this so I am going to work on that language, and 2) I'd like anyone's feedback about what would make a repository "malicious"; I'll use that to improve the info on the About page, and to better hone my submission workflow. The last thing I want to do is introduce something dangerous to someone who is maybe not looking at the source or even the READMEs. So to answer the above, anyone can submit whatever they want on Pacmax. The last thing I'd want to do is build something that aims to improve the discoverability of the amazing workflows that you and others offer the community, only to be selective about what's posted. I simply have no desire to do that If I've seemed unclear about "what Pacmax is and what it wants to be" it's probably only because, frankly, my initial mission was to create a more usable site for developers and non-technical people who haven't gone beyond installing Powerpack. It's a work in progress, but I do think it's improving, especially with everyone's feedback. I hope I've addressed your questions though. It's important to me that I have, so if not please let me know and I'll do my best to. Thank you for outlining this! I'll do my best to explain this for non-technical users. I'm also going to work on how Pacmax pulls the files (eg the GitHub releases). Yup! That's all I meant. 🤘 Yes, this is what I'm trying to spare people from. And thanks for seeing that; usability is important to me and I want to make it simple to browse and share on PM because that sort of double-step/bugginess gets old fast. I'm going to work on the way PM works with the repo URLs as well as how the site handles submissions. What might be easier for developers to submit (if they decide to, I mean)? Would a multiline form be better? Perhaps once I get monorepos working, developers may prefer to work that way. But for the time being and for devs who might not, I'm wondering what I can do. Again, open to suggestions. As @dfay mentioned, until there's some sort of standard I am going to do my best to fetch the files a number of ways (to fit the few preferences people have). @deanishe Sure thing. I will un-publish your repositories. If I may though, as I expect to have this cleaned up before very long at all, I'd love to get at you so that I can confirm it is working as you'd expect it to. You do amazing work and I'd hate to not see your contributions on Pacmax; it'd be a major loss to me. Mind if I shoot you a message here once I have, to see if I have? Thanks again for everyone's feedback. I hope I was clear; I may make an edit if I think I can be more concise. Cheers!

Hi all, I am thrilled to see this post & that my original post was unhidden. Sorry for the late reply; I had no idea it was visible or that this post was here until this morning. I'm going to do my best to follow up on each point now; please let me know if there is anything else that I can touch on more. Thanks for the mention @Vero and @nikivi for posting this thread! Understandable—I've been a long-time lurker and have been talking some via email with an Alfred admin (who has been great, by the way). I've been excited to hear from the community at large, which is why I wound up posting what I did to Reddit. Hopefully, now I'll be able to better communicate here. This sounds great and if you're interested I'd love to learn more about that. With the spider being a hit or miss, that was my major concern and why I opted (for now) to have things be manually submitted; automation has absolutely been on my mind though. And, even the possibility of having major contributors be given more control over adding packages to PM. Anyways, I am all ears and would love to learn more. I agree with Deanishe that the AAW repo is a different matter; I've actually recently contributed to Awesome Alfred Workflows because I think it's great and wanted to see it be a little sharper. I believe in making the adding of packages more accessible for not just developers but non-developers; which is where I think I was sort of coming from when I decided to undertake a sort of Packal-like site. As an aside: That XKCD is too real. Haha. I see what you mean and that is definitely an oversight on my part. Honestly, I added it because I felt like once and a blue moon someone might help pay for even a portion of the web hosting which really isn't much; I've probably invested more time than anything. How would you suggest I add Donation options for the developers? I'd love to incorporate this. I've also been working on making it more clear on each post who made what and where they can find more from them. In closing, I want to do anything and everything I can to automate the submissions of packages & better highlight the developers. This is new to me, but I do want to make the most of this. I know I started out with the aim to make a more usable site, and I think I'm in the right direction, but I look forward to improving it further. It was great reading the above and I look forward to more! If anyone would like to reach out to me about more in-depth feedback or feature suggestions, about anything we've discussed here or otherwise, please don't hesitate to shoot me a message here or at hi@pacmax.org. Cheers, Max P.S. I apologize for my wonky formatting here. I wrote this all in MD and it didn't convert very well. I am sure I will come around to the editor here in the forums. I also didn't maybe go as in depth as I'd like to but I have a few projects going on for work that I need to get to now. So, to reiterate, please reach out if there's anything I can improve on.

👋 Hi. Long time lurker stopping by to share something I've been working on. I'm calling it Pacmax (PM). Akin to Packal (which is a great website that I'm sure we all know and love) PM is my attempt to fill what voids I feel exist in the current landscape for the other Alfred lovers out there, like myself. Namely: 1) It works from the source, dynamically updating content from GitHub. 2) No accounts are necessary to add Workflows and Themes, because I'm curating submissions. 3) Adding to PM is as simple as submitting the GitHub repository. Repos with files that use the appropriate .alfredappearance & .alfredworkflow extensions will enable PM to display Import (themes will open directly with Alfred) and Get Import File (workflows). There is plenty left to be desired—so your feedback is very important! I hope you'll check it out and let me know what you think. Don't forget to add your favorite Workflows & Extensions! I've added a few of my favorites, and have even discovered some real neat repositories that I felt were worth sharing. If anyone is interested, you can learn more about Pacmax at pacmax.org. If you have any kind of feedback or are interested in maybe getting involved on a deeper level I welcome your feedback over at pacmax.org/feedback Thanks and all the best, Maxwell