Dial with PushDialer workflow

[kopischke]

I’ve gone and created a workflow to dial numbers found on your Mac with your iPhone via PushDialer, as I found Florian Pellet’s PushDialer workflow a bit simplistic for my taste. This one has the full trimmings (dial from text selection via hotkey, from the Alfred prompt, or from the Alfred contact viewer), more robust filtering and error handling, Alleyoop support for updates as well as a nice little extra in the form of script filters allowing you to find numbers to call right out of Alfred:


There is a somewhat more detailed post announcing it on my blog, and the workflow itself is on GitHub (direct download link is here). Hope somebody finds it useful.

Updates:

• 1.0.1 fixes escaping of shell metacharacters (aka “who wants to dial your $PATH”).
• 1.0.2 queries with non-ASCII characters now work (aka “der Süden tanzt”).
• 1.1.0 Searchlight edition: significant improvements to the search functionality of the call family of script filters (see this post for the details).
• 1.1.1 fixes sorting of script filter results (aka “Alphabet, sagtest Du Alphabet?”).
• 1.1.2 fixes case sensitiveness in incremental searches (aka “a flock of cases”).

Check for updates with Alleyoop, or re-download from GitHub.

Edited April 9, 2013 by kopischke

[Domenic]

Nice.

Could this script somehow be changed to work with Prowl or Pushover?

[kopischke]

Easily. The dialing logic proper is in the final script action (rightmost column in the workflow window), just change the open call there to a curl call for Prowl or Pushover. Everything else in the workflow does not depend on PushDialer. Note however that the Ruby sanitization script (middle column in workflow window) strips an eventual tel: protocol prefix, so you will either have to edit that to bypass the stripping, or re-add it in the final step if your destination expects such a protocol to initiate dialing (Prowl does, AFAIK).

[Domenic]

Very nice.

Got it! Thank you for your fast response!

And for the workflow!

 

@all:

It was really easy.

I just took the script of "Send a message to pushover" by Dimon Hunter and replaced it with the open call in this workflow.

[kopischke]

Some bugfix updates since first release (see update list in original post). Also wanted to tease that I am working on a few real features extensions, the biggest one having to do with the request by Domenic above .

[wbranson]

I'm having a strange problem. I cannot pair my iPhone 4S to my rMBP.

 

Any thoughts on a possible solution?

[kopischke]

@wbranson sorry, but this thread is for the Alfred PushDialer extension – not for generic iOS / Apple hardware compatibility with OS X support. If by “pairing” you mean PushDialer pairing, I suggest you ask the PushDialer author (whom I am not affiliated with) for support.

Edited April 6, 2013 by kopischke

[kopischke]

I’ve just updated the workflow to the Searchlight edition which improves the call search functionality:

• uses a more sane default number sequence (starting with mobile and excluding fax)
• also searches nicknames for a match
• refines results incrementally for every word added to the query, over all searched fields (i..e name, company, nick):

​

• fixes case sensitive / insensitive matching of UTF-8 strings. 

EDIT:

• version 1.1.1 fixes result sort order; these will now match the collation rules for your locale.
• version 1.1.2 fixes incremental searches not respecting case sensitivity under certain conditions.

Edited April 9, 2013 by kopischke

[xilopaint]

Hello kopischke, I use custom tags for my iPhone's contacts numbers and the workflow doesn't show these results on Alfred, but only the contacts with no custom tags on the phone numbers. Is there any chance to release an update with a fix? I am not a developer so I have no idea how to fix.  

Edited June 22, 2019 by xilopaint

[kopischke]

Hello @xilopaint, sorry for the late reply. I’m afraid there is not much I can help to do about this, as it is a limitation of the underlying utility the workflow uses to retrieve the numbers. See this issue on the GitHub repo.

Edited June 24, 2019 by deanishe
Replace real name

[xilopaint]

Oh, I understand. Thanks anyway for replying!

[Empyreal]

Hi Kopischke --

 

I also pinged you on your tumblr blog, but I was wondering if a modification is possible in Alfred....

 

What I want is a keyword that uses the current selection as input into Dial.  I know that you have the keyboard shortcut, but I wanted a keyword.  I am new to Alfred (old Quicksilver user) and couldn't figure out a way to do that in Alfred.   If I use a keyword, it doesn't have an option to take the currently selected text.

 

Of course, I could do a CMD-C and then invoke the Alfred and the keyword "DIAL" and press CMD-V to paste it in.  I was hoping for something a tad bit more streamlined.

 

Thanks!

[kopischke]

Hey @Empyreal, I’m sorry to say that is not possible, to my best knowledge. To get the current selection, the application which contains the selection must be focused for the selection to be extracted – which it is not when Alfred’s window is open and waiting for input. There are ways to navigate around this if you can script the background application (and, even more to the point, know which one you need to target), but none built into Alfred, at least currently.

[Empyreal]

Hey @Empyreal, I’m sorry to say that is not possible, to my best knowledge. To get the current selection, the application which contains the selection must be focused for the selection to be extracted – which it is not when Alfred’s window is open and waiting for input. There are ways to navigate around this if you can script the background application (and, even more to the point, know which one you need to target), but none built into Alfred, at least currently.

Thanks, Kopischke.  That totally makes sense.  Oh well.  Couple keystrokes, not a biggie, but thought it'd be worth it to find out. Glad that I didn't miss anything.

Cheers!

 

[Curtis]

Kopischke,

 

This looks like a pretty amazing workflow, but I'm not seeing any contacts when I try "Call John". I think I've tracked the problem down to the contacts app which pulls the names/phone number from the address book. If I try "./contacts John" from the command line, I get "Illegal instruction: 4". I tried to use the contact package on the site you reference, but not love from those either. I'm on a new-ish MBP running 10.7.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks

[kopischke]

That‘s odd – the very same command runs fine on my system, and I have had no other reports of it being otherwise, Lion or Mountain Lion. As there is no documented incompatibility of contacts with 10.7 (which it predates, BTW) I can only surmise there is an issue specific to your system. Are there any logs in Console.app that say more than “illegal instruction”?