tjluoma

Well, the other day when I tried launching ScreenSaverEngine, it did not work, but Alfred was still able to trigger it successfully.

Today ScreenSaverEngine.app is working, so it's harder to test that theory.

I've noticed that Alfred seems to have AppleScript support, but I can't figure out how to use that to tell Alfred to run the screensaver command.

I am experiencing a bug in Big Sur where this AppleScript…

tell application "System Events" to start current screen saver

…does nothing, even though it has long been the way to start the current screen saver from the command line or a shell script.

However, Alfred's "Start Screen Saver" feature by using the `screensaver` keyword DOES work, so it is clearly doing something else.

How can I incorporate Alfred's method of starting the screen saver into a script?

On the Mac, where apps do not require Apple’s approval to be sold (outside of the Mac App Store), if you can find a way to accomplish something using a private API (which is “something which exists, but which Apple does not intend for the public to use, and therefore does not document or offer any support for”).

However, building a tool like this is like building a house on sand. Apple can change that private API at any time which may break your “solution” because it relies on something that Apple does not consider itself responsible for supporting/maintaining. For example, it could work in 15.6.7 but break in 15.6.8 and any bug reports to Apple would likely be ignored because you were doing something they never intended for you to do.

Even with “supported” Mail.app plugins, each major update of macOS almost always disables plugins which have not specifically been verified for that version of macOS, meaning that plugin developers have to be vigilant to stay on top of last-minute changes, etc.

I think it is fair to say that the "market" of available Mail.app plugins has gone down dramatically over the past several years, with several plugins being abandoned as developers decided it was no longer worth it to try to maintain them. There are still a few out there, but (I believe) not nearly as many as there used to be.

All of which is to say that Houdah has apparently decided to do something which may work, but is going to require them to devote a lot of developer-hours to create and maintain it, all the while never knowing if the whole thing is going to have the rug pulled out from under them in some future release of macOS.

And, although I don't speak for Alfred, I can also imagine that this is not something that they would want to do, because it would be a lot of work and might break at any moment, but once they offer it, customers will expect that it will be offered and supported (by Alfred) for all eternity. Therefore it would make much more sense to say "If Apple has worked this hard to prevent us from doing this, we're not going to do it unless they give us an officially sanctioned option to do it."

IMO.

(and Vero posted just before I did, and I should have just waited for their reply anyway.

Same… I don't see any evidence of that on Twitter, their website, or Google News.

For some reason, Alfred seems like it is taking longer to appear when I press the Alfred Hotkey.

It's not really long, but it's longer, which I know because I'll press the hotkey, then I'll start typing, but the first few letters don't get into Alfred.

I'm not sure what to do to diagnose what might be the cause.

/Applications/Alfred 4.app:
    CFBundleShortVersionString: 4.0.8
    CFBundleVersion: 1135

Have you granted Alfred "Full Disk Access" in System Preferences?

Of course it hasn't done it again after I complained about it.

This was after a fresh install, so I'm wondering if it was related to Spotlight caches being built.

Alfred does not always seem to notice when I install new apps in /Applications/

I have tried typing the full name of the app into Alfred's search box, but it doesn't appear.

Restarting Alfred did not help.

Any ideas on what else to try?

/Applications/Alfred 4.app:
    CFBundleShortVersionString: 4.0.5
    CFBundleVersion: 1118

on macOS 10.14.6

On 10/25/2019 at 6:36 PM, deanishe said:

But you can also do it with Automator using a Folder Action.

That's true, and Folder Actions are free (well, except for time spent getting them to work.)

If you really wanted to nerd out, you could even use `launchd` and have it watch ~/Downloads/.

I've found Hazel to be far more reliable and far easier for most folks to understand than Folder Actions. YMMV.

I suspect that folks who appreciate Alfred would also love Hazel. It's well worth the asking price. 

(To be clear, I have no connection to the company, just a long-time happy user.)

22 hours ago, tbrown said:

Confusing, and I have no idea what the difference might be.

I'm not running Catalina, so I can't say this definitively, but presumably Preview.app is considered to be part of the OS, whereas Pages is an-app-made-by-app-not-tied-to-the-OS.

To put it another way: you download Pages from the Mac App Store, whereas Preview comes with the OS.

7 hours ago, deanishe said:

It would probably make more sense to use another application or script to watch your ~/Downloads directory and move new files into today's folder.

That sounds like a perfect job for Hazel.

Ah. Well, I was unaware there was a way to do this in Alfred, so I've learned my new thing for the day.

This is very simple to do with Keyboard Maestro. All you'd need to do is tell Keyboard Maestro that when you press the secondary keystroke to send the primary keystroke.

Setapp is still able to insert itself into the Favorites in Finder, although I'm not sure how they are doing it.

It’s good on all of your Macs

I’ll echo this. I use Resilio Sync (which is a terrible name, but that’s beside the point) and it works very well. I use that to sync folders outside of Dropbox.

One of the nice things is you can setup separate folders. For example, I sync /usr/local/scripts/ and ~/txt/ and ~/Downloads/ between my Macs, but my ‘scripts’ and ‘txt’ folders will continue to sync quickly even if ~/Downloads/ is syncing large files. Often times, Dropbox syncing a large file can prevent other files from syncing quickly.

You can also use a “Selective Sync” which means you can see the files locally but only choose to sync specific files if you want them locally.

I had actually done that with a similar utility that I use in Terminal, but found that I preferred having an actual temporary file to BBEdit's "sort of / kind of" temporary file. It also means that if I find that I want to retrieve something from a recently-closed temp file, I can usually find it.

But it's good to have options.

Someone just asked for this because the previous link is dead (I'm the worst). So here's a current link:

https://files.luo.ma/alfred/bbpaste.alfredworkflow

AHA! Now I get it. Resetting the 'scope' back to the default did the trick.

Many thanks. I hadn't even noticed that those were different.

Ok but how is it working on one computer and not the other?

I have a Safari bookmark which begins with "TQ".

When I launch Alfred and type "TQ" I expected that this bookmark would be one of the ones that I see.

That works on my MacBook, but not on my Mac mini.

Here are my preferences, which are sync'd between the two computers:

http://images.luo.ma/alfred/tq/Preferences.png

Here's what I see, on my Mac mini compared to my MacBook

http://images.luo.ma/alfred/tq/tq-compared.png

Any ideas why this is happening, and (more importantly) how I can fix it?

Thanks

I often cut/copy a bunch of text, then switch to BBEdit, then create a new document, then paste the text.

I realized today that this is stupid and inefficient, when all I really need to do it

pbpaste | bbedit

so I created an Alfred workflow that does just that.

http://share.luo.ma/alfred/bbpaste.alfredworkflow

Note:

To use this you'll need BBEdit installed, obviously, but also the bbedit command line tool. If you purchased BBEdit from the Mac App Store, you will have to download and install them from here:

http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/cmd-line-tools.html