Subject22

I've done that in the past and found that the icon often is visible in Finder. I'll document it the next time I encounter it.

The Notifications preference pane icon is visible in Finder and Spotlight, but not in Alfred.

Spotlight may do caching for preference panes, but there is definitely something funny going on outside of Alfred's control. I still haven't seen this happen, and it hasn't been reported outside of this thread... it's definitely metadata related though, so outside of Alfred's control. If I see this becoming a wider spread problem (or if there is a bug in OS X which Apple don't fix), then I'll add a ticket to manually include these in Alfred's results.

OK, thanks!

Also, when you see one not showing an icon in Alfred, take a look at that particular one in Finder as it likely won't see the icon either.

I've done that in the past and found that the icon often is visible in Finder. I'll document it the next time I encounter it.

Thanks again for your input :-)

I tried renaming it/naming it back, but no luck (I reloaded Alfred's cache and checked for it in Spotlight too). Nothing. But still, it's strange that different panes are searchable at different times, and it's even weirder that usually (though not in the case of the Java preference pane at the moment) panes that aren't searchable in Alfred show up in Spotlight.

EDIT: Perhaps it's worth mentioning that I've noticed that sometimes preference panes (including built in ones) don't have a proper icon displayed with them in Alfred, instead they show the default preference pane icon (the light switch).

Inconveniently enough they're all showing at the moment (as I said, it's intermittent), apart from Java, which is weird at the best of times. Nonetheless, here's the output. I'll keep that tool handy and the next time I encounter the issue I'll post again. Thanks!

A while back I posted a thread asking for help with an issue I have where Alfred spontaneously stops displaying certain preference panes in search results. Given that it's been a month since I authored that and the issue persists I thought it would be appropriate to post a bug report. At the time I wrote that post Alfred was not showing the Displays preference pane, while other preference panes were returned as expected. Alfred currently returns Displays, but not Sound or Desktop & Screensaver. Here is a summary of the troubleshooting steps I have taken:

• Reloading Alfred's cache
• Restarting Alfred
• Restarting my machine
• Removing and re-adding the PreferencePanes folder to Alfred's search scope
• Removing and re-adding the PreferencePanes folder to Spotlight's Privacy section
• Doing a clean install

At all times all preference panes are correctly shown in Spotlight's search results. As implied above, the preference panes which are missing from Alfred's search results vary with no discernible pattern. It may also be useful to know that a friend of mine has the same issue (he is also on Mavericks).

Intriguingly Alfred now shows the Displays preference pane but not the Sound one. A friend of mine mentioned having similar issues.

EDIT: I figured I might as well post a bug report about this, since it's been a while.

Or instead of removing/readding the folder to Alfred's search scope, try adding then removing it from Spotlights Privacy section.

Just gave that a go. No luck. After adding and removing things are back as they were before.

EDIT: As a side note, the Displays preference pane shows up in Spotlight's search results, just not in Alfred's.

I did a clean install of Mavericks last week and up until today everything was going smoothly, but now it seems that Alfred is unable to search for the Displays preference pane. All other preference panes are searchable, but typing 'displays' does not cause the Displays preference pane to be returned in the search results. I've tried reloading Alfred's cache, restarting my computer, and removing and re-adding the PreferencePanes folder from Alfred's search scope. Any help would be appreciated :-)

This is a cool idea, and could be very useful. I don't have time to do more than scan this thread at the moment so apologies if this has already come up, but my feature request would be to condense the layout a bit, potentially adding columns. The more densely the information is presented the more quickly I can scan for what I'm looking for :-)

In order to avoid bloat, it seems like it would be better to write a different workflow to open a window on another desktop / display. This workflow is perfect for moving windows once they're opened, but what you're asking for seems to be a completely different feature, albeit one that would complement this one well.

 

Subject22, maybe you could take a shot at writing it up for all of us?

I go on (effective) holiday in a couple of weeks so I may well do just that, though I do have a few other personal projects queued up

This doesn't appear to be working in Mavericks. At least, it's not working on my system at the moment, and I did a clean install of Mavericks about 4 days ago.

Oooh, this looks neat Could I be impolite enough to make a feature request? I've always wanted to be able to specify a monitor when opening/focussing an app with Alfred. I'd love to be able to type "lay Messages 2" or something to have Messages opened on my second display, regardless of where it started (I stick pretty much exclusively to full screen mode with my apps, so I'm not sure how I imagine this working with windowed mode). Again, very cool workflow.

I'm not sure (using my ipad right now) but I think you can make Alfred index this volume in Alfred preferences.

Yep, you can. Alfred Preferences > Default Results. Go to the Search Scope pane and hit the plus button. Find your hard drive (or just your Dropbox folder, if that's all you want). Be warned that adding external drives to Alfred's search scope can have a small impact on performance. If you invoke Alfred while the disk has been spun down then you may find that Alfred pauses while the disk spins up again.

Using Alfred's email <contact> command opens a separate email composition window rather than bringing up the email composition overlay in full screen view. Although I'm currently running Mavericks DP6 I believe that this happens in Mountain Lion too. Similarly, when running on Mavericks it'd be neat to have Alfred open new Finder tabs rather than separate windows (especially while Finder's in fullscreen mode) when responding to commands. Is there any way of making Alfred behave in this way, or should I post a feature request?

Mavericks is still in beta, I know, but I thought I'd mention this anyway.

Very very nice. I'd like to translate it, but i guess that it works via webpage, doesn't it?

Nope. All the calculations are done locally.

Haha, that's a little frightening Glad it works :-)

OK, that's fair enough :-) I'm glad you're still developing this workflow! One thing which puzzled me was that in units_v2.php you include large blocks of data with seemingly repeated entries. Take this one for example:

$this->add_to_lib(1, 0, 'PB', 'digital', '|PB|petabytes|','petabytes', 'Petabytes', 'B|kB|MB|GB|TB');

The "|PB|petabytes|" entry is just the concatenation of two other entries with pipes to delineate them, and the "petabytes" and "Petabytes" entries differ only in capitalisation, something which could be easily adjusted with a simple function. That and the haphazard alignment of the data blocks seems incongruous in an otherwise sophisticated and well laid out script. Why did you choose this format, if you don't mind my asking?

OK, I've made those changes and uploaded a new version behind the link in the first post. Apple's support for AppleScript is a bit patchy these days so I had to research a few workarounds (there's also an annoying bug which causes Safari to calculate the number of windows it has open incorrectly). Everything seems to be working OK, but test it out and let me know how you go :-)

No problem! I have a little time at the moment so I'll take a look at it tomorrow. If for any reason it seems like I've forgotten or been distracted post back here and I'll apologise and get back onto it

No problem! I thought about implementing an auto-close feature but decided against it as it seemed like a personal preference sort of thing. Thanks for posting your code, hopefully other people'll find it useful :-)

Hzlzh, my response is almost exactly the same as kopischke's, except that I don't provide Alleyoop updating or use Github - I prefer to keep everything linked to the forum. I'd also appreciate the ability to remove my workflows from your site, should I wish to do so. If I ever adjust the way my workflows are hosted (Dropbox currently) I don't want to have to make those adjustments twice. If you ever make those changes though (and maybe streamline the positing process on your site) I'll be happy to contribute workflows :-)
 

Hi @hzlzh, much as I appreciate what you are trying to do, I’ll not submit my workflows to your directory as long as a direct upload is required. I provide Alleyoop updating in all workflows because, for time and efficiency reasons, I want to keep new version uploading to one target only: the GitHub repo the workflows are stored in. However, should you ever decide to drop the direct (“backup”) download requirement and accept GitHub-only submissions, I’ll gladly add my workflows to your list (and of course I won’t object if somebody else wants to take it upon her or him to do so – the collected workflows are WTFPL licensed, after all   ).

I believe the kernel panic issue was with PPC machines, not the Intel one you're doubtless using. There's an app available that simply executes that code and the reviews for it seem positive. You could either bundle the app with the workflow and call it with an AppleScript to eliminate the need for additional installs, or try to roll your own script with the code linked above (relinked for posterity). Of course you may be completely happy with your current solution, there's really nothing wrong with it (apart from requiring an additional download). It's less worrisome than executing code of uncertain providence, but you could give it a shot anyway. What's life without a little experimentation?

AppleScript has built-in support for scripting key presses so I had assumed that if you didn't like the system shortcut then you could have written an AppleScript to press those keys for you (with an accompanying workflow to tie the script to a key combo of your choice), but it seems that the eject key is not scriptable.

Wow! You're right, there's not much in the way of options for doing this. Rather than scripting mouse movements, did you come across this in your searching? I have no idea if it still works, but it seems to be someone else's solution to the same problem :-)

Oh, and I'm not sure what your use-case is, but have you considered the in-built OS X keyboard shortcut for sleeping the display? Shift+Ctrl+Eject.

Yay! You legend! Gave it a little tweak and it works perfectly! This is freaking awesome. Just so you know where I'm coming from, my use case is either 1) the file's already in Dropbox in which case I want to hit a key combo and just get the direct link to it (without worrying about my file system getting disorganised), or 2) the file's outside Dropbox and nine times out of ten I want to move it to my Public folder and grab the link (usually because I just took a screenshot).

It would have been a good idea to have linked to the original ;-)

I'm not sure precisely why the wallpaper changes, but I don't think it has anything to do with Alfred, or that workflow. Try enabling fast user switching in System Preferences>Users & Groups>Login Options then use the fast user switching menu bar icon to go to the login screen (this has the effect of locking your Mac). Type your password in and you'll see that your wallpaper's changed again, at least, mine does. I don't find it problematic as I have my wallpaper set to randomly cycle through an iPhoto album so it doesn't matter that it changes. You might be able to find a workaround by putting your wallpaper image file into a folder, setting that folder as wallpaper source folder (in System Preferences>Desktop & Screensaver>Desktop) and then ticking "change picture". Your wallpaper would never change, as there'd only be one image in the folder, but when you unlock your Mac it might remember to use that folder to draw images from again. I don't know, just an idea :-)

On the other hand, there appears to be a bug in OS X that causes wallpaper preferences to reset to their defaults (I'm not sure when it happens, just that I have to manually reconfigure my wallpaper settings every so often), so this might be related. Bring on 10.9!