Is it possible to export all workflows

[nikivi]

Is it possible to export all workflows I have automatically?

 

I would love to include all workflows I have for other users to download in my macOS repo. However, the only way I see I can do it is to manually export each workflow. Is there way to automate this process somehow?

 

Thank you for any help.  

[vitor]

You mean all Workflows you have, including the ones you haven’t built?

Please don’t.

For one, you may not be allowed to, depending on the Workflows’ licenses. Even if you’re not in violation of their licenses, you’re still harming the other developers and their users: credit becomes unclear; you deflate their download numbers; you freeze the Workflows to older versions; you may inadvertently introduce other problems.

You’re also hurting GitHub by abusing their free tier for hosting binaries that aren’t yours and no one asked you to host¹. In the past GitHub removed the possibility of binary downloads, which thankfully came back as releases. Lets not give them any reason to roll back on that decision. In the end they’re still a company that has real costs to generously provide a service for free to the open-source community.

---

1. Important distinction. Packal does something similar, but it’s at the specific request of users.

[nikivi]

Yeah that is true. I just have so many awesome workflows that I think many people would really benefit from discovering and downloading in an instant to try out. And since Packal search is broken, it is quite hard to find them if they are not on some awesome list on GitHub. I got most of the awesome workflows from browsing Packal actually and trying them out. 

 

It would be super cool though to get something like a 'starter pack' of workflows or 'essential' workflows for new users coming into Alfred. Something like searchio or spotify mini player to name a few. In my search engine, I have a map for learning Alfred and I thought it would be cool to have a kind of 'essential starter pack' for Alfred to get people hooked on Alfred and inspired to make their own things. I am also planning to write an article on how to write workflows because I could not find a tutorial that really goes in depth into the process, most are introductory and don't go over the details as much as I'd like them too.

 

Also I know of Alfred's recommendations but I think it is really lacking. For example, there is this workflow that exists out there which for me has been absolutely life changing on a similar vein to Searchio and yet nearly no one knows about it. Which I think is a shame.

 

But yeah, I think I will just make a GitHub list that is free to fork with links to downloading the workflows. That is the best way to solve this. As for the article, it would be quite cool if someone super experienced with Alfred wrote about their 'workflow' of developing workflows. That would be quite interesting to read.

Edited July 31, 2017 by nikivi

[vitor]

23 minutes ago, nikivi said:

I just have so many awesome workflows that I think many people would really benefit from discovering and downloading in an instant to try out.

 

Then link to their original download pages.

 

23 minutes ago, nikivi said:

And since Packal search is broken, it is quite hard to find them if they are not on some awesome list on GitHub.

 

Packal follows a predictable URL pattern: http://www.packal.org/workflow/{{workflow name}}. You don’t need the search if you already know which Worflow you want to find.

 

34 minutes ago, nikivi said:

Also I know of Alfred's recommendations but I think it is really lacking.

 

Because it was made shortly after Alfred 2 was released and not updated since.

 

34 minutes ago, nikivi said:

For example, there is this workflow that exists out there which for me has been absolutely life changing on a similar vein to Searchio and yet nearly no one knows about it.

 

Probably because it’s not really life changing for other people. There’s no such things as “essential Workflows”, just like there’s no such thing as a “must read”. Everyone’s needs are different. WatchList is likely the Workflow I most use, and yet I doubt it’s even my most popular one.

 

27 minutes ago, nikivi said:

But yeah, I think I will just make a GitHub list that is free to fork with links to downloading the workflows.

 

Instead, contribute to the one that already exists.

 

40 minutes ago, nikivi said:

As for the article, it would be quite cool if someone super experienced with Alfred wrote about their 'workflow' of developing workflows. That would be quite interesting to read.

 

I could write multiple, from making Workflows themselves to how to manage making and updating Workflows. But I doubt there’d be enough interested people to justify the commitment.

[nikivi]

1 minute ago, vitor said:

Instead, contribute to the one that already exists.

I would love to but I just don't fancy the format of it and I doubt the author wants to switch too. I like to have Gif demonstrations of workflows where possible. 

 

Something similar to this. Will update more in time but it is also free to be improved via pull requests.

[nikivi]

13 minutes ago, vitor said:

I could write multiple, from making Workflows themselves to how to manage making and updating Workflows. But I doubt there’d be enough interested people to justify the commitment.

 

Also I would read it and I am sure other people interested in making workflows would love to read too. Our search engine is also starting to generate quite a lot of traffic which I think is quite awesome and I would love to improve the 'learn Alfred' mind map.  

[vitor]

33 minutes ago, nikivi said:

Also I would read it and I am sure other people interested in making workflows would love to read too.

 

But not enough to justify the amount of detail/work I’d like to go into.

[deanishe]

3 hours ago, nikivi said:

Packal search is broken

 

https://github.com/deanishe/alfred-packal-search

 

1 hour ago, vitor said:

But not enough to justify the amount of detail/work I’d like to go into.

 

The big problem, imo, is knowing where to start. I.e. what level of skill do you assume on the part of your audience?

 

Once you start writing scripts, a workflow tutorial becomes a combination tutorial on general UNIX scripting, Alfred and one of Ruby/PHP/Python/JS.

 

I definitely think some tutorials touching on Alfred "idioms" would be very useful.

 

I'm reluctant to write any more given the number of hours I've sunk into Alfred-Workflow's documentation. It's not so much that I don't want to write any, it's that I don't want to keep them up to date when Alfred changes.

I had to rewrite the Workflow/Environment Variable HOWTO for Alfred 3.4.1, and I really don't fancy having 10+ articles I'd need to update (leaving them out-of-date isn't really acceptable to me).

 

[deanishe]

2 hours ago, nikivi said:

I like to have Gif demonstrations of workflows where possible.

 

What program do you use to capture the GIFs? The one I've been using doesn't work anymore  

 

Regarding your Learn Anything > Alfred Workflows page: Bear in mind that each demo GIF is typically a few MB. You really shouldn't embed more than a couple of them on the same page. Nobody wants to use 1/5th of their monthly mobile data volume looking at a single page.

 

Why don't you instead try to make an awesome Alfred site instead of a single page? Write a review of/article about each workflow instead of recreating the Awesome Alfred list, except with huge GIFs.

 

[nikivi]

@deanishe I use Kap which I quite like. I just need to find a way to optimise the GIFs I get as a result of it as the size gets large really fast.

 

15 minutes ago, deanishe said:

Why don't you instead try to make an awesome Alfred site instead of a single page? Write a review of/article about each workflow instead of recreating the Awesome Alfred list, except with huge GIFs.

 

 

I can do that, true. But GitHub has this awesome property that other people can add things to it or fix mistakes I made. And yeah that kind of sucks to have a page full of GIFs for mobile users. I am actually looking into Hugo, trying to understand it to transfer my personal page to it. Maybe I can use that for this purpose.

 

My idea with Learn Anything is to learn anything in the most efficient fast way and the idea behind this alfred list is similar. I want a new user to come to this page and have a way to see all the awesome workflows that the community already made and GIFs help in that aspect. Not many people browse GitHub on their phones too imo. 

 

I can give a warning that many GIFs are included ahead maybe.  

Edited July 31, 2017 by nikivi

[vitor]

55 minutes ago, deanishe said:

The big problem, imo, is knowing where to start. I.e. what level of skill do you assume on the part of your audience?

 

I always wanted to make tutorials that would be kind of like a tree. Something like a dictionary in which when you’re looking up the definition for a word, all the words in the definition are themselves links to their definitions. So you’d have an advanced Workflow tutorial that at every step has links that explain concepts and those have links, and you go deeper and deeper until the most basic tutorials. That way each person branches off only when they need to.

 

1 hour ago, deanishe said:

(leaving them out-of-date isn't really acceptable to me)

 

Same. I’m taking that into account when I say I doubt there’d be enough interested people to justify the commitment.

 

1 hour ago, deanishe said:

What program do you use to capture the GIFs? The one I've been using doesn't work anymore

 

Only tangential, but this year I started “Software suggestions for regular users” (the README explains). Not that you’d fit into “regular user”, but it can also serve as an alternatives list to power users. Kap is there, so I got reminded of it.

 

35 minutes ago, nikivi said:

I can do that, true. But GitHub has this awesome property that other people can add things to it or fix mistakes I made.

 

GitHub pages.

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, nikivi said:

I can give a warning that many GIFs are included ahead maybe

 

That doesn't help if the warning is on the same page.

 

1 hour ago, nikivi said:

Not many people browse GitHub on their phones too imo.

 

Based on which data exactly?

 

[deanishe]

6 minutes ago, vitor said:

I always wanted to make tutorials that would be kind of like a tree. Something like a dictionary in which when you’re looking up the definition for a word, all the words in the definition are themselves links to their definitions. So you’d have an advanced Workflow tutorial that at every step has links that explain concepts and those have links, and you go deeper and deeper until the most basic tutorials. That way each person branches off only when they need to.

 

That's a fantastic idea and an absolutely huge undertaking.

 

1 hour ago, nikivi said:

I use Kap

 

Thanks. I'll check it out.

 

1 hour ago, nikivi said:

I am actually looking into Hugo

 

9 minutes ago, vitor said:

GitHub pages

 

www.deanishe.net is hosted on GitHub Pages and the "main site" (such as it is) is built with Hugo. There's no actual content beyond an auto-generated list of what I've been up to on GitHub and Pinboard recently, but that's where the gh-pages branch of Alfred-Workflow ends up, so I figured there should probably be something at the root URL, and I found a Hugo theme based on the Sphinx one I use for AW's docs.

 

Having built a few sites with Pelican before, I have to say that Hugo is bloody awesome. So much faster, so much less buggy.

 

[nikivi]

 

4 minutes ago, deanishe said:

Based on which data exactly?

Just speculation.

 

I agree that having many GIFs on the same page is not very data friendly but I really love how it looks in the end. You just get one scrollable page of workflows with their demonstrations, no need to go to some place else. 

 

9 minutes ago, deanishe said:

That doesn't help if the warning is on the same page.

 

It actually does since on mobile, the entire page is not expanded before user clicks 'all' like here : 

 

 

 

I just like GIFs too much and the simplicity of one GitHub page.

 

 

 

[vitor]

6 minutes ago, deanishe said:

That's a fantastic idea and an absolutely huge undertaking.

 

It is. It’s one you can’t really justify going into if you don’t have any guarantee of it making at least some revenue (Patreon?). It’d be a pro-grade tutorial with tons of interconnected content, after all. Or alternatively if you want to risk the huge amount of work as a side-project that’ll consume a lot of time. Since at this moment I have no reliable source of revenue, it’s not something I could justify going into right now without some type of assurance (like a Kickstarter, or something).

 

3 minutes ago, nikivi said:

You just get one scrollable page of workflows with their demonstrations, no need to go to some place else. 

 

Until you have so many it’s just a huge list and no one will read it all, just scroll through a bunch of them. Especially since the gifs are so big, you basically only see one Workflow name and one gif at a time. At some point you’ll need categories, and to divide those into pages.

 

5 minutes ago, nikivi said:

It actually does since on mobile, the entire page is not expanded before user clicks 'all'

 

True, but that preview is so small, I doubt even the warning would fit properly.