dan

I agree with this. The UI worked well when it was just colours that could be changed as it was obvious what the options were and where to click. However now that much more is configurable, I'm not sure it works very well. Having to cycle through options with no way of seeing the full list of options or any indication of where you are in the list makes it clumsy to edit some of the attributes. Especially when the editing causes the window to change such that the mouse is no longer in the right place to change that option again! I realise it's a boring interface, but just having a form with all the options on it would make life quite a lot easier. It doesn't have to be the primary interface for it, perhaps putting it under an 'Advanced' button would be a good solution, but I think a more basic way of editing would be good.

The problem with this is that Node.js isn't included on Mac OS. I've been looking at whether it would be possible, but I think the only way would be to distribute the Node binary with the workflow. The list of supported languages are all installed by default on Mac OS, but Node needs to be installed manually. You could just assume that it is installed and provide instructions to users that they must install it, but this isn't a great user experience and many people won't be able to do it. To allow Node scripts in Alfred would require distributing Node.js which is 10MB. Considering most workflows seem to be < 100KB, it seems unreasonable to include it with one, especially if multiple workflows are all going to require it. Alfred 2.0 is also 4.6MB (uncompressed) so I doubt Andrew wants to include it by default. It is possible to write a system to run JavaScript plugins using JavaScriptCore which is included in Mac OS, I'm actually writing one myself for another project, but the downside of this solution is that it is not a Node environment. You don't get NPM, no Node modules will work, and all the file system/http/etc APIs need to be written from scratch. This is a huge amount of work in itself and as Bash, Python, Ruby and PHP are available there is really very little to be gained from this work. Python and Ruby are good languages with great communities, lots of documentation, support, and libraries that have already been written. I highly recommend them as an alternative to JavaScript.

Hey everyone, Got a workflow for you! Just enter 'r/' or 'r/subreddit' to get the 'hot' news from Reddit. http://danpalmer.me/blog/articles/2013-01-12-reddit-workflow-for-alfred-20.html The workflow is written in Python, feel free to have a read of the source to see how it works to help you write your own workflows if you like.