vitor

I’ve reread that multiple times and can’t decipher what that mean in practical terms. 1. How are you making the adding os packages “more accessible”? 2. In what way are the current solutions not accessible enough? Right now your solution seems less accessible, because you’re a gatekeeper to whatever gets added to the site. And you haven’t answered my previous point: 3. if I want to submit to Pacmax, am I supposed to dump almost 50 Workflows on your lap lap for you to go through? 4. Are you the one who decides which Workflows are added to the website? 5. If yes, why, what’s your criteria for inclusion or refusal? If you are curating, that would indeed make Pacmax the same as Awesome Alfred Workflows and far from a Packal replacement. Packal wanted to be the central repository where everyone could share their Workflows. The biggest problems with Packal are that it asks for too much information for a submission and is buggy. Had it been bug-free, we wouldn’t even had noticed it was abandoned nor would we be needing an alternative. But it still works, even if crippled. Manual addition, by comparison, will only work for as long as you’re excited with the website, and that makes me worry for its longevity. That’s my biggest eyebrow raise with Pacmax right now: it isn’t clear (and specific) about what it is or what it wants to be. Awesome Alfred Workflows is shameless about being a subjective biased list: it’s a particular kind of list (from the “Awesome” series) connected to a specific person, and mentions curation right away. Packal is automated and lets anyone submit whatever they want. Pacmax, I don’t know. The optimistic news is you seem like a nice person with a true desire to make something good. Make no mistake, I see Pacmax as having positive potential. But it’s common for projects to die for lack of enthusiasm, and with the subject of sharing Alfred Workflows, every time that happens we get worse off. People submit to what is popular at the moment, and when that dies off most don’t jump on the next thing, so we keep losing Workflows in the process. So I hope you understand where my worry comes from and why I have some reservations (and many questions) about what Pacmax is and what it wants to be. But I also want to make it clear that I thank you for at least trying, and I understand these may only be your first steps.

Discussion continuing in

Update. Added support for Vivaldi and Brave. I’ve skipped Opera since while we can get the URL and Title from a tab, we can’t execute JavaScript (to run the bookmarklet to add bookmarks). The capability seems to be there (being Chromium-based) but not a way of turning it on. To update, download the latest version (same URL) or wait a few days and it’ll prompt you to on next usage, since it uses OneUpdater.

Update. Added support for Vivaldi and Brave.

Update. Added support for Brave. To update, download the latest version (same URL) or wait a few days and it’ll prompt you to on next usage, since it uses OneUpdater.

Added support for Brave.

You neither need triggers nor one workflow per fallback. All you need is to setup Fallback Search Triggers, connect them to a few Open URL Actions, and use a modifier for each connection, with the browsers you want. Don’t forget to activate them in Alfred Preferences → Features → Default Results → Setup fallback results. Yes, it’ll take a bit of initial work, but it’s self contained and will work exactly as you’re asking.

It’s not: Why do we need a website to fill Packal’s void? What’s wrong with the Github lists? Why not just grab one of those and make a website (automated)? Also, people are still submitting to Packal, so there’s no void yet, just a badly plugged leak. Unrelated, if you post in a row you should edit your post instead. Otherwise the thread quickly becomes hard to read.

I feel the same. Right now, there’s not much difference between this and the old http://alfredworkflow.com/ or the still current https://github.com/Derimagia/awesome-alfred-workflows. And with a manual adding process, it doesn’t really make me want to submit there. Am I supposed to just dump almost 50 Workflows on Pacmax’s creator’s lap? It’s a nice effort, but I wonder if at this point it isn’t making the situation worse, by fragmenting the community even more.

Either work on Alfred for Windows already started, or it hasn’t. If it has, registering support does nothing because it would happen anyway. If it hasn’t, even if work on it started today it would take so long (with the current team), that by the time it was done there would be no guarantee all the people asking for it today would still be interested. Over years there’s only been a handful of people expressing interest in this, not nearly enough to justify the commitment to support a whole new platform. Alfred Remote for Android would make sense way before Alfred for Windows, and that is unlikely to happen as well (there’s another thread on it). Yes, in theory it could happen. In practice, you shouldn’t get your hopes up in the slightest.

I do blocking at the /etc/hosts level, with a list from StevenBlack/hosts. But the typical blocklists such as the ones uBlock Origin uses have further granularity than outright blocking an entire domain. That is a lot, though. I would consider that to my /etc/hosts file (not to the router as I’m sure that’d break something for other people). Is the list public? And more important, does it receive regular updates?

I second this sentiment. I found this post earlier but it read as “do this”, so I limited my effort to a cursory glance at the website, and since the answer wasn’t immediate I abandoned the effort. Don’t take this as a critique. Instead take it as a tip on how to ask people to do free coding work for you, from someone who makes a lot of free Workflows for others. We could be doing something else with our time. We choose to help people because we do get something out of it: an interesting challenge or the joy of seeing someone elated with the code we built. Sometimes people are so happy with the result they send a small monetary contribution as a token of their appreciation, though that is not why we do it. But until the outcome, it’s a thankless job of uncertain reward. Sometimes it’s boring but we can whip it up in a few minutes and improve someone’s life, so we do it anyway. Other times it’s hard as hell: we devote hours only to fail, and we can do nothing more than share breadcrumbs of our findings to ease the burden of the next one to try. This is your wish. Still, we offer our expertise to help you achieve a goal we don’t share. To justify that commitment, we need to feel that you’re serious in your endeavour. We don’t ask that you spend your money, but we do expect that you invest the same thing you’re asking of us: time. There are two main components to a coding project: what it does and how you interact with it, i.e. how you tell it to do what it does with which parameters. Both take time, not only to build but also to decide on how they are going to be built. The more time you spend on one of these, typically on deciding how you want to interact with your application (because yes, it is yours in the sense we’re building it to your specifications), the less we need to. And that shows respect for us and our time. When you’re sparse on details, the message you’re sending is you don’t care about your request enough to spend the time doing basic research or thinking about how you want to interface with the result. And if you don’t care, why should we? Note that not caring is not the same as not being able to figure it out. Asking for help deciding on the details is valid, and we do find it rewarding to teach people who want to learn. But there is a direct correlation between how hands on you are trying to solve your own problem and other people’s willingness to help you do it. We all have a limited pool of time, and given the choice we’ll help the people who are mindful of the ones who help them.

Same. There’s no browser today that fits my needs: Safari’s content blocking is laughable. The 50k rule limit is less than a third of my uBlock Origin rules. Plus, there’s really no good content blocker I’d trust to be kept up-to-date — the only decent one, 1Blocker X, exists only on iOS and there seem to be no plans to update it to macOS. Plus, Safari has no fine grained control to only allow JavaScript on certain websites. In sum, Apple has a good stance on privacy but their actions are lacklustre. Ungoogled Chromium is a nice effort, but since they are removing code from another project, I don’t trust them to somehow not remove something they should, or not be behind on security features. Opera and Vivaldi drink from the same water as Chrome, and I worry abou their affiliations. In this day and age, I’d rather not trust a closed-source web browser. Brave also drinks from the same water as Chrome. They claim they don’t have to follow their bad practices, but the tune may change when they start to have to maintain their own browser engine fork due to the differences. A bunch of other web browsers that neither support AppleScript nor have enough users/scrutiny for me to trust them. Firefox has no AppleScript support and its performance on macOS is atrocious. I can get past the latter, but not the former.

So as to not split the discussion, I’ll lock this one and point people to the previous thread.

You’ve stumbled into why most people that build browser automation tools and Workflows do not include Firefox (and also why some people avoid Firefox completely): lack of AppleScript support. Presumably, what that Workflow is doing to support Firefox is automating keystrokes, in this case ⌘L to select the address bar followed by ⌘C to copy its contents. This (and any method that relies on automating key presses) is hacky and should be avoided, though if you really want to keep Firefox, you don’t have much choice. I recommend you go to Mozilla’s bug tracker and be one more voice asking for AppleScript support. Though some of those requests have been open for 17 years, so I wouldn’t be hopeful.