Ideas to improve blocks in Alfred

[nikivi]

I wonder if there could potentially be a way to create some kind of block abstractions in Alfred? This thread inspired me to start a discussion on this. 

 

 

 

It’s not much of an issue to me honestly but I do wonder if it would be nice to at some point have a way to group multiple blocks into a group and reuse that group across workflows. When workflow gets downloaded, things work out of the box too. Just a thought. 🙃

Edited April 15, 2021 by nikivi

[deanishe]

What kinds of blocks?

[nikivi]

One thing I wanted in Alfred personally that is not related to above 'block abstractions' is custom blocks.

As example, instead of creating an empty Alfred Workflow JSON block and filling it with content like so:

 

 

I would right click and have a new option `Custom` where I have a selection of custom prefilled blocks with custom names. Above block can be named `Strip title/subtext` for example. To add a new custom block, right click on some block and add it to the collection. To remove, perhaps have a new place somewhere in Alfred Preferences that lists all the added custom blocks with ability to edit or remove/rename the blocks.

 

Not a big issue of course but it could be nice.

 

As far as abstractions go, I think Alfred is actually kind of perfect and even huge workflows like Spotify Mini Player are relatively easy to understand even if they do have many blocks. I was thinking it could be useful perhaps to combine multiple blocks into one block in a similar fashion to `custom prefilled blocks`. But copying and pasting stuff is much more cleaner and avoids indirection etc. 

Edited April 16, 2021 by nikivi

[nikivi]

As inspiration for the custom presaved blocks idea, here is a plugin for Keyboard Maestro that some user made:

 

https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/macro-kmfam-favorite-actions-and-macros/4854 

 

I kind of want that but for Alfred.