deanishe

When using the modifier keys (like Ctrl for Search with the default web search, Alt for Search with Spotlight and Cmd for Reveal in Finder (if local)), the icon shown on Alfred should reflect the action that will be activated, like the default web search icon, the Spotlight icon and the Finder icon in the example I gave instead of the icon representing the result itself.

On many Alfred items (Files and Apps) I can hit tab and a list of actions shows up. I’d love for this to be also possible with URLs. Especially the “Open in…” action, which would show all apps capable of handling the URL (e.g. with http(s)-URLs it would show me all my browsers, with vnc-URLs it would show me Screen Sharing, Chicken of the VNC, etc). Currently URLs only open with the default handler application.
 
One other cool thing this allows is for custom workflows to add actions on certain URL schemes. This way I could add the “Download with Folx” workflow I’ve always wanted…

It is fascinating, but it is irrelevant for the topic answer in all senses.

It can be tricky finding workflows on the forum, so I thought it'd be a good idea to have a list of those true gems you just can't live without to help other users get themselves some great new workflows.

So let's hear about those four or five workflows that make a Mac feel broken when they're missing!

Workflow authors: no pimping your own wares; if they're that good, someone else will mention them   

Here are mine:
Dash by Bogdan Popescu. Search programming documentation with the Dash app. Couldn't code without it. So, so good. ssh by Robin Breathe (isometry). Open ssh connections without grubbing around in Terminal. MarkdownBulletin by Vítor. Convert Markdown to BBcode. Markdown rocks, BBcode sucks. Wrote this post (and all the others) with it. Chrome Bookmarks by Marat Dreizen. No more clicking around in Chrome's GUI, or trying to tell your bookmarks from your history in the URL bar. Application Chooser by Gabe Weatherhead. Search applications by tag. Don't use it often, but it's a true lifesaver when you can't remember the name of that app you rarely use but really, really need right now. As long as you remembered to tag it (which you will after the third time grubbing through /Applications looking for the darn app). Let's hear yours.

Yup, you paste them into Terminal.
LaunchServices is the OS X subsystem that is responsible for tracking which applications are installed and which filetypes they can open.
Parallels does something I consider to be particularly dumb and uses the same names for its proxy applications as the native Mac versions. As a result, they often override the native applications.
Re-registering an application will update its entry in the LaunchServices database. Hopefully, this will lead to the Mac app taking precedence over the Parallels proxy.
De-registering the Parallels proxy app (make sure to adjust the path to the command) should remove it from the database. Don't do this if you ever want to use the windows 1Password from your Mac.

I think you've missed the point, which is don't use Run NSAppleScript.

# SafariHistorySearch
Alfred workflow to search Safari history written in swift.   #Usage `shs <SEARCH_TERMS>`   Separate search terms with spaces if you want to search for more than one word. ie:    `shs github safari`     Each word is searched separately. If you want to search for a phrase,  surround the phrase with double quotes, ie:     `shs "Alfred Workflow to Search Safari History"`    The results contain all search terms. This workflow searches the page url, page title and page body if available.   see https://github.com/akaralar/SafariHistorySearch/releases for latest version.   I hope you like it!

I'm silly....way way way better solution....forget about the delay or anything else....
Go to your workflow->doubly click on your hotkey to open the hotkey settings(can also right click->configure)->Right click in the hotkey field and change
the trigger behaviour to "Wait until modifier keys are released"
That will do it!
 
Always learn something new ^^

Hey Nick,
 
Regarding the "Updating …" message: I'm going to remove that bloody notification—it hangs around far too long.
 
But fundamentally, it's impossible to update Alfred's results live because that isn't how Alfred works. It only takes a couple of seconds to retrieve the new data from DFX, but Alfred's results only ever change when you change the query. For any given query, Alfred calls the script once. To run the script again, you must change the query.
 
Regarding favourite actions etc., the ability to add favourite folders via Alfred is coming in the next update.
 
Regarding the "hijacking" of your original post, when I push the next version, I'll update your post with a link to my post with the description, screenshot etc.
 
I'll try to get that done at the weekend.

Hey Nick,
 
Turns out a DFX workflow was a bloody marvellous idea (at least that's what I think). It's the best source of recent folders/favourites by far.
 
As a result, I've updated the workflow to be what I consider a "proper" workflow.
 
Basically, it now talks to DFX in the background, so it will be waaay faster, and I've also turned on auto-updates (at least partially).
 
Please download the new version from the URL above.
 
And thanks for the great idea!
 
Let me know if you have any more splendid ideas to improve it.

Wouldn't it make sense to post the URLs, so that other users could also use your custom searches?
 
Double-click a custom search in Alfred Preferences, then "Copy URL for sharing".
 
You may have to use Code tags (the <> button) to post them, however, or the forum software will mangle the URLs.
 
For example, here's my TheTVDB.com custom search:
alfred://customsearch/Search%20TheTVDB.com%20for%20%27%7Bquery%7D%27/tv/utf8/noplus/http%3A%2F%2Fthetvdb.com%2F%3Fstring%3D%7Bquery%7D%26searchseriesid%3D%26tab%3Dlistseries%26function%3DSearch Copy and paste the URL into your browser or Alfred to add it.
 
EDIT: Apparently, the code tags aren't necessary any more since the URL-encoding bug in Alfred was fixed.

That's indeed interesting information, thanks
 
I suppose that would have to be included somewhere as well but I'm not sure what would be the best location. I don't think the entry_points would be a great fit.
 
Personally I would recommend the usage of MANIFEST.in alone and simply ignore package_data. They largely overlap in functionality and I would argue that the MANIFEST.in system is easier to interpret as it doesn't offer any mapping/rewrite options.
 
As for a better tutorial, chapter 15 of my book covers the usage of MANIFEST.in but I'm not sure if it's that much clearer... I'll send you the paragraph soon so you can judge for yourself
   
Looks like a very nice starting point      
Ideally Alfred would support the entry points natively which would even make it possible to do a pip install -e workflow for development purposes. That would break backward compatibility however so I don't think that should be the first or only option.
 
What I would like to propose is a setuptools build command which generates the entire workflow including the Alfred XML from the setup.py file.
 
To ease development I think it should also contain a alfred_install or alfred_develop command to symlink the package so Alfred sees the workflow straight away.
 
The added benefit of the setuptools entry points approach is that it would allow for a plugin manager to easily detect all Alfred plugins and show a list of available entry_points. That would allow for easy documentation as well since everything will be automatically generated
 
 
 
The single strongest argument I can think of to go for a smart utility is consistency. A single silly mistake in a workflow can break everything which is especially annoying for inexperienced developers.
Not having to worry about packaging, uploading and the writing of a plist file at least removes that part of the equation.
 
Everything is open for discussion of course, as long as it makes it things easier for developers  
 
 
That could be interesting, and generally easier to write than setup.py files
 
 
Ok, I'll edit the start post

There's no software that can read your mind, alas.
 
You can drag the image into the proper folder in the first place.
 
You can tag the image and have Hazel do different things depending on the tags.
 
You can write a simple AppleScript (or Python program) that does indeed pop up a dialog box asking you what to do with the image, and have Hazel run that for you.
 
AppleScript dialogs are simple enough.
 
Pashua and cocoaDialog are available if you're not insane and therefore do not want to use AppleScript.

Re-open Alfred and hit the up arrow. That will bring back your previous query.
 
Too many keypresses? Assign a hotkey to the following AppleScript (with Alfred or Fast Scripts or whatever):
-- Open Alfred tell application "Alfred 2" to search "" -- Wait for Alfred window to appear delay 0.2 -- Simulate Up-Arrow keypress tell application "System Events" to key code 126 You may need to increase the delay 0.2 (or you may be able to reduce it).

Good point. I always forget about that.

MailMate, tbh. Absolute powerhouse of a client and the developer, Benny, is amazing. It's fairly pricey, but Benny has literally spent an afternoon helping me with an issue and made me a special build.
 
That said, I think it has a few problems with Gmail due to Google's non-standard implementation of IMAP.

If its just about having the previous query back, then you can also change your settings. Under Advanced -> History -> Activate "Show latest history if within 5 minutes"
I got the tip from Vero a little while ago: https://twitter.com/alfredapp/status/711159248017858562

Generally, it's a better idea to ignore the Run NSAppleScript Action and use the normal Run Script Action with language = /usr/bin/osascript (AS) instead.
 
The reason is that Alfred blocks while a Run NSAppleScript is running, so you can't use Alfred, but a Run Script is always run in the background.

FWIW, I was looking into the security of Lastpass (and others) last night.
 
It seems that the password used to log into the online service is derived from your master password in such a stupid way as to make your master password hundreds of times easier to crack than an offline-only copy of your database would be.
 
They also do some rather questionable things, like storing known, encrypted text in the database, which also makes cracking your master password much simpler than it would otherwise be. And ironically, the known text in question is "lastpass rocks"…

In addition to that you can right click on the workflow and show it in finder. In the Packal folder is a file called "package.xml", where the Version number is saved.
Its not a convenient way of checking but yeah
 
Other than that you can just call "Packal Updater" and check what updates are available like deanishe said.

Wow - very well thought out! Many thanks for this workflow - sure to be a real time saver.  :thumbs up:

I don't think there is an available fix without a fudge, and seeing as a fix to this would have an intrinsic roll on effect to Alfred's core behaviour (every single time you use him) makes me extremely reluctant to change anything in Alfred with regards to this.
 
Take for example checking running apps, Alfred would have to actually hide to know which app is active as Alfred is the active app when visible (even as a Panel, when OS X shows a different app name in the titlebar). Then Alfred would have to re-show and steal focus by force. This may be unintended behaviour as there are legitimate times when apps launch in the background without stealing focus.
 
Either way, I've raised a developer ticket with Apple, so I'm going to wait and see what they say with this. As Vitor notes, you see the same behaviour with Spotlight so I suspect the real fix to this is in OS X / Finder not stealing focus when an app finishes quitting.
 
Cheers,
Andrew

The root cause is that the Spotlight API does diacritic folding, the AddressBook API doesn't.
To get diacritic folding with contacts, turn on:
Alfred Preferences > Features > Contacts > Advanced > Use Spotlight metadata for searching contacts.

Of course it can

I have completely rewritten my workflow to make it work even if the project name contains one or more space.
The code doesn't care, and simply checks that a section number is correctly entered.
I did as you said as well, and got the .sh script on a dedicated file, using /bin myscript.sh {query} to set the positional parameters.
 
This workflow now works exactly as intended, thank you for your help!
#!/bin/bash #code under MIT licence, modified from Stack Overflow, Unix.com and Ask Ubuntu answers, from the users below: #bashist http://stackoverflow.com/a/6968547 #Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams http://stackoverflow.com/a/2210386 #robotronic http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-and-scripting/42417-what-does-mean-double-pipe.html #geirha http://askubuntu.com/a/29596 #the positional parameters are set from Alfred's script filter #test if the last parameter is a valid integer. if [[ ${@: -1} =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then #run the automator workflow. ${@:1:($#-1)} = All parameters but the last; {@: -1} = last parameter automator -D project_name="${@:1:($#-1)}" -D section_number="${@: -1}" folder_cleanup.workflow #If the last parameter was not a valid integer, send a notification else echo 'Incorrect section number? Try again' fi