MuppetGate

Great! :-) Thanks for letting me know. I've now implemented the 'parse-as-you-type' feature suggested by Dean, so there's a new version up On Packal.org

That's very clever! I'll have a crack at it when I've checked some examples.

Okay, that should have taken care of it.

Yes, not only did I forget to set the correct default, I also forgot to credit the HumanFriendly folk for a library. I'll sort it out later today.

Date Calculator Hello there! I needed a bit of motivation to learn Python and Alfred workflows, so I thought I’d kill two horses with one bullet, so to speak. Right, so this is a date calculator – kind of. It won’t tell you when you will the lottery, or how long you’ve got to hide your ‘arty videos’ before your wife gets home, but it will answer one or two very simple questions about dates. For example, if you enter dcalc 25.12.14 - 18.01.14 then it will tell you the number of days between those dates. Note that the workflow parses the command as you enter it, so you’ll see invalid command, invalid expression and invalid formaterrors as you type. Once you’ve completed the command then you’ll be given the result. You could also try dcalc 25.12.14 - now for the number of days until Christmas. (Always seems so far away . . .) Maybe you don’t want it in days, but would rather it in weeks: dcalc 25.12.14 - now w or days and weeks dcalc 25.12.14 - now wd or years, months, weeks and days dcalc 25.12.14 - now ymwd or dcalc 25.12.14 - now long will do the same thing. Personally, I always use the long format because it’s more accurate. For those who like to look ahead, you can add days to a date dcalc now + 6d or weeks dcalc 18.12.14 + 9w or combine ‘em dcalc 18.12.12 + 5y 9d 3w - 2d + 1d 1w What does that mess do? Take the date 18.12.12 Add 5 years Add another 9 days Add another 3 weeks Then take off 2 days Add another 1 day And then add another 1 week If you want to know what week number you’re in, then try this: dcalc today wn Or for a specific date: dcalc 25.12.14 wn You can also use the today thing in other places too: dcalc today + 4d And we have another thing called time because the workflow can handle times too: dcalc time + 6h 8M will add 6 hours and 8 minutes to the current time. Note the capital ‘M’ to denote minutes. Odd, I know . . . sorry, but the workflow has to distinguish between this and a small ‘m’ (for months). I figured make this one a capital because it would see much less use. (It has for me.) If you just want the current time, then just enter dcalc time Here’s another time calculation dcalc 14:35 + 6h That’s the time 6 hours from now, and for real nerdiness: dcalc 21.06.14@14:20 - 23.01.12@09:21 long Probably not all that useful, but some of this other stuff might be. You know all about dcalc now For giving you the current time and date. While you can use dcalc tomorrow for tomorrow’s date, and as you would expect dcalc tomorrow + 1d will give you the day after tomorrow. dcalc next tue will give you the date next Tuesday. Or for for Thursday you could enter dcalc next tue + 2d if you’re still a little too inebriated to realise that dcalc next thu will give you the same answer. That about covers it, I think. I haven’t done anything clever with locales, but you can pick a different date format with dcalcset date format And we also support both 12-hour and 24-hour time formats. dcalcset time format I would recommend sticking with the 24-hour format; it's a lot easier to type because the AM/PM symbols have to be in upper case. You can also set the combined date and time format using: dcalcset date and time format If you’re ever puzzled by invalid command or invalid expression errors, then start with the settings; they might be set incorrectly. Oh, almost forgot. dcalc easter Is the date for next Easter Sunday, for no other reason that I can never remember it, and now there’s an easy way to find out how many days until Christmas: dcalc today - christmas And to celebrate finishing my new book, I decided to add: dcalc passover Alternative parser If surround a simple expression in double quotes, then something quite magical happens: dcalc "4 hours 8 minutes after 4pm" or dcalc "6 weeks and 4 days after next wednesday" or dcalc "1 day after tomorrow" Yup! A natural date language parser! You can even combine it with the existing parser: dcalc "next friday" + 1d This is a little bit experimental (I might drop it later if it proves to be problematic), but I thought I'd throw it in for a bit of a fun. Credits A list of things that made my first attempt at Python programming possible: Dean Jackson for his more-than-slightly awesome Alfred Workflow framework(Jetbrains(HumanFriendly(Python-DateUtil(PyPEG(ParseDateTime(Programming Praxis(MIT(http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) one will do. :-)The MIT License (MIT) Copyright © 2014 MuppetGate Media Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Agree with just about everything here, especially the ability to get data from other scripts & workflows to get multi-level items. I'm playing with workflows at the moment and the Alfred-way is pretty hard going. Since Apple is including Javascript for Automation in Yosemite then I guess Javascripting will land in the Autumn. This won't help folk who don't upgrade to the new OS though. I notice that Launchbar also has the beginnings of a site for sharing extensions. I think Alfred is also lacking a standardised way to do this. Packal is great, but we still can't download and update workflows from inside Alfred. One other small thing: I'd like access to the side window that Alfred uses to display contact information, song details etc. The Notification Centre window is sometimes too small, and sending messages through Large Type can look like your shouting at people.

Fair enough, but it would be great if they baked the runtime hooks into the OS, as they seem to be doing with JavaScript.

That's a shame. A command-line runtime would be brilliant.

I've been reading through Apple's manual and I think Swift would make a pretty good scripting language. I don't know if Apple will allow Swift apps to be run from the command line: swift hello.swift "{query}" but would folk be interested in building workflows with it, if they did? Just curious.

Killer workflow. Great work.

+1 Especially the part about using Applescript dialogs and the flashing. This would replace the need for two items I asked for a couple of years ago: An input workflow module that could be used to pick up extra bits of info from the user. A conditional workflow module that could branch other modules depending on the value of its output. Something like this would also bring in a lot more workflows that wouldn't need to interact directly with users. We could have workflows that just store settings, for example.

S'okay. Remembered how it works!

Hi there. I'm playing around with Ruby workflows and I'm trying to pass a keyword parameter out to a notification. The problem seems to be that I'm not reading the input parameter passed in on the workflow invocation. The workflow script just does this: print ARGV And all I'm getting is an empty array. Is there something I've missed?

Great articles. Thanks for taking the time to write these. For the same reason 'Hello World' examples aren't written using IDEs, closures and recursion:Keeping it as simple means the user can get something up and running quickly, which encourages him to press on with something more complicated. It keeps the focus on Alfred, not on introducing extras like RubyMine or PyCharm or other tools which are distracting for the learner.

Hi there. Using V2.2 (241). The tooltips on the workflow editor are incorrect. The debug icon displays the correct tooltip, but the other two show 'toggle debug mode'.

Came across this thread while looking for HUD techniques for Alfred. The thing is, Alfred already has another display window: the notifications area. So I don't think it's unreasonable to have a HUD display for showing help pages or messages that need more space. However, the HUD should only allow for one action: close. It would be great if there was a built-in workflow module that supported this. Though I can see how allowing the HUD to render as HTML could cause problems.

This might help to get you started. http://www.packal.org/workflow/create-folder

Just what I was looking for! Thanks.

Yup, I think this one has been suggested a couple of times. Good idea. I think integrating this into Alfred would make the whole process a lot more integrated. As a prompt is run then Alfred could shift his window contents off to the left, which would be a visual cue that you are still running the same workflow. Aesthetically it would be much nicer.

So is the official Alfred repository ?

I would like to see this implemented: http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/812-feature-request-prompt-action/

I think some sort of debugging is planned, according to a tweet I read a few days ago.

+1 for this.

The problem is that this isn't necessarily related to just workflows; the search results in general can be overly broad. If I type 'fav' then I'd rather not have every fav.ico file show up in the search. I'd like some way to exclude '*.ico' or 'fav.*' from the default results. I think this is one of the tradeoffs with using Spotlight. Most of the work (updating, indexing etc.) is handled for you, but the cost is flexibility. I know applications similar to Alfred don't share its shortcomings (difficult to control inclusions/exclusions; doesn't deal with networked drives) because they build and maintain their own indexes. On the other hand, these other apps don't look anywhere near as good, and can be a pig to set up

Yup, I think this is a must-have. I've got loads of .ico files showing up in the results, which I don't really need.