Open recent different in Alfred and in the app

[levelbest]

I know that Alfred can do a lot more than I currently can do with it. One of the ways I have come to depend on using Alfred is to look for a document by first remembering what I used to create it, arrowing to the right to see recent documents, and arrowing down and selecting the document.

I am also seeing that as I just sampled when writing this, Pages showed only two recent documents in Alfred. Then, after I launched Pages and checked recent documents, quit Pages and tried again in Alfred, I saw a full list of recent documents - many more than two.

 

I am seeing that Alfred seeing recent documents is not always accurate. I am wondering if there is a setting I need to adjust, if this is a bug, or if this is just because some software developers follow a non standard approach to how they store there recent documents compared to how Alfred sees them? I was writing initially about iStudio but Pages has to be pretty Apple standard.

[Vero]

@levelbest There are two ways Alfred gets these recent documents:

 

- When you open a file using Alfred

- When it's provided by OS X

 

With the second method, it relies on applications correctly providing and updating their recent documents file. Unfortunately, not all apps store this information in a way that can be accessed (namely, Microsoft Office apps like Excel and Word), and other apps don't necessarily update this information instantly. As you saw, Pages seems to update its list of recent documents when quitting the app, so Alfred is reliant on this.

 

If you open these files with Alfred, they'll then be listed in Alfred's Recent Documents as well.

 

Cheers,
Vero

[Andrew]

A quick note that macOS recent documents have changed in high sierra, so only internal recent documents may be shown in 3.5. I'm currently working on updating Alfred to read high sierra recent documents for 3.5.1.

 

Cheers,

Andrew