MuppetGate

Thanks. The newer version works fine. 

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

Very nice.

 

Have you thought about making a Script Filter, so that you get the result/error message live?

 

Kinda like this:

 

That's very clever!

I'll have a crack at it when I've checked some examples.

It will only say: Invalid command!

Okay, that should have taken care of it.

It will only say: Invalid command!

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

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  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

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I just looked through the programming guide for LaunchBar 6 "actions" which are their equivalent of workflows. Alfred, in general, has more comprehensive workflow support (not even counting the GUI layout tool), but LaunchBar 6 has some features it would be nice to see in Alfred:

 

- Scripts can be marked to be killed if they don't return before the next keypress, e.g., user types 'A', script searches the internet, user types 'B', script is killed and re-run with 'AB'

 

  This is an overall feature that's been requested many times but I don't think anyone actually mentioned killing the currently running script.

 

- Scripts support either 'strings' or 'paths'

 

  I believe a script that takes a path gets path completion support in the LaunchBar entry box.

 

- Scripts can return a 'string', a 'path' or a complex result

 

  LaunchBar assumes defaults for everything if your script just returns a string or a path instead of XML, JSON, etc.

 

- Environment variables are passed to the script w/various paths and information about the state of the option key, command key, etc.

 

- LaunchBar can accept script output in JSON, XML or a property list XML

 

  I don't care about property list XML, but I would love if JSON was an option.

 

- Items returned by a script can include a quicklook URL

 

- Items can indicate another script to run to get the next 'level' of items, e.g., a multi-level menu

- Items can directly list out the next 'level' of items

 

  Various Alfred scripts now have hacks that "re-call" the script and mimic multiple levels of results. LaunchBar bakes it into the workflow model.

 

- LaunchBar actions are code signed

 

- LaunchBar supports using JavaScriptCore as a scripting language

 

- Scripts can marked to be initiated by LaunchBar but LaunchBar immediately returns (doesn't wait for output)

 

 

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.

You can run in on the command line if you have Xcode installed:

 

/Applications/Xcode6-Beta.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift

 

Use the -i flag to interpret the code, no flag compiles it.

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:

1. An input workflow module that could be used to pick up extra bits of info from the user.
2. 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?

Hi,

Lastest tutorial for Alfred has been posted. Give it a read: https://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/track-project-time-with-alfred-timekeeper--cms-20981?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mactuts+(Tuts%2B+Mac+Computer+Skills)

Why are you pasting the code into the Script boxes instead of using external scripts?

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'.

I think that the entire purpose of Alfred's results is exactly this ... to display results. Wouldn't creating 'another' display window defeat the purpose of 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. 

My dream is that there would be a new type of "Workflow Input" called "Variable" or "Setting".  You could give it a name and then there would be a simple text box to let a novice user type in a value for the variable/setting.  I could then connect these input variables to my more complicated/generic scripts and have those scripts use the user-defined variables.  I imagine these would be available to my scripts the same way that the "{query}" variable can be used.

 

 

 

Thanks for considering.

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.

Alternatively, I would suggest looking at your workflow and see how you can create filters to narrow down things. A lot of people think it's better to just add lower level folders to the scope so that Alfred searches everything but it affects performance and just clutters your results to the point that you have so much in your search results that you can't find what you were actually looking for.

 

I personally don't want EVERY type of file/folder in my search results because I typically know what I'm looking for. I know if I'm looking for a picture, or a folder, or if I want to look in a specific folder that I work in frequently. I use workflows and filters to drastically reduce results to match exactly what I want.  For instance, my defaults are to only show contacts, preferences and applications in results. I have filters for searching for ONLY folders, bookmarks, mail, chat, etc because I know when I'm looking for those things. 

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.