Cheeky little transparency blur hack for themes

[samvlu]

@James You are right, opacity must be less than 100%.

I made screenshots for anyone else having trouble with the blur effect.

I hope this helps!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Restart Alfred after setting Blur Amount)

 

 

[YtseJam]

Excellent. Thank you.

[roza]

Works fine for me. 

To those having trouble, make sure to have set the opacity <100% if you haven't done so. 

What do you mean? Isn't opacity runnig from 1 to 5 and set by the -float command?

 

Is it possible that this is not working for people who sync their preferences with dropbox (or a similar service)? Like YtseJam I can't get it to work...

[roza]

scratch my last post. How do I get to that little "border color" window?

[James]

What do you mean? Isn't opacity runnig from 1 to 5 and set by the -float command?

 

Is it possible that this is not working for people who sync their preferences with dropbox (or a similar service)? Like YtseJam I can't get it to work...

 

I believe the terminal command is used to implement only the blur effect, which of course is futile if your theme is not transparent.

Go to Alfred pref -> Appearance tab -> click the background part of the theme and the palette should pop up.

Hope that's clear enough 

[roza]

weirdly if I click the background, the color of the background simply changes but no palette is shown. right click also doesn't do anything. Any other idea?

[James]

click the background part of the THEME. not the wallpaper

[roza]

sorry, I have clicked really everywhere by now... no window showing up. Do I need the google chrome theme for this?

[roza]

geee, sorry guys, I got it now. --- The original themes coming with Alfred cannot be edited. One needs to duplicate an original theme first....

[James]

No, it's not dependent on themes. Either we are having communication problem or you might have deeper issue with install

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/chq9mdogdvnei8a/Mountain%20Lion%20Blue%20II.alfredappearance?m

 

Download that theme and try the terminal command on that. That theme is transparent so the terminal command should work as long as you follow remember to quit alfred before entering the command.

[roza]

no, what I meant is: the color palette is not coming up when you click on any of the standard themes because you cannot modify those. Only newly added themes can be modified so this is the only way to bring up the color palette to adjust transparency.

 

It works now...

 

Thanks!

Edited March 16, 2013 by roza

[samvlu]

 

Here's the Google Chrome Blur Theme that I used in the example.

Make sure to use the Alfred Blur Workflow to set transparency to 3.

Enjoy!

 

 

Download here:

http://d.pr/f/Vy6q

[dan_djorgi]

And a cheeky little workflow to go with it.

 

http://cl.ly/MLMP

 

(Keyword: blur)

 

Works like a charm, thanks!

[Ddyracer]

This hack is so cool, turned mine off for now though. Thanks Andrew!

[albertkinng]

Hmm, this fails for me as well... :/

 

OS X 10.8.3

Alfred v2 official release build

 

1. Quit Alfred

2.1. Launched Terminal

2.2. Executed: defaults write com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred-2 experimentalBlur -float 3.0

3. Launched Alfred

 

Still looks as before.

 

My friend, don't sweated.

 

you need to apply it (as I can tell you already did) and then go and customized a them using the opacity option of the color palette. then you will be able to see it . good Luck!

[ckizer]

This little hack is now available in b78!

 

I just purchased Alfred. I've only used a bit, but I see the value in workflows vs. Spotlight. I'm a visual design, and wanted to created a theme. Can you please put a checkbox for "Antialiased" font only? It's fairly easy to do in your Xcode project.

 

antialiased looks a lot better on dark themes. On the right is my design.

 

 

 

Also a few other design workflow type things:

• Where is quick look? When I search for PSD, you don't expect me to open them to see inside right?    when I search for an image, where do I see the inline preview like spotlight gives?
• How can I hide the long redundant path of Applications under the App? I want to do it only on Applications? (Better yet, it only shows when i hold option or a modifier key)
• When you first launch Alfred it would be great if you explained to users that to get spotlight equivalent search you need to use "find". My first test was to search alfred vs. spotlight for a filename. Alfred obviously only showed two files, spotlight had 12 neatly organized and grouped. It made me assume that alfred even with tweaking would never be as good as spotlight for search. I almost trashed the app till I checked out the forums and realized that I needed to activate search. Probably just a good idea to let users know that it's a bit different than spotlight.

GREAT stuff, keep up the great work. I want to use css animations in my themes :-)

Edited March 29, 2013 by ckizer

[ckizer]

Also it would be great to have a lot more control in the themes. Border thickness and so forth. I highly recommend you just let us use CSS to stylize the window. Otherwise if we can only change the color of a few object (no gradients), themes aren't really needed because it's less likely that i would want to download somebody else's color settings if I can easily create the same thing. 

 

Keep up the great work!

 

My theme (blur won't work until Alfred supports Antialiasing):

http://kzr.me/170w401P1k2P

Edited March 29, 2013 by ckizer

[Ddyracer]

Also it would be great to have a lot more control in the themes. Border thickness and so forth. I highly recommend you just let us use CSS to stylize the window. Otherwise if we can only change the color of a few object (no gradients), themes aren't really needed because it's less likely that i would want to download somebody else's color settings if I can easily create the same thing. 

 

Keep up the great work!

 

My theme (blur won't work until Alfred supports Antialiasing):

http://kzr.me/170w401P1k2P

 

 

It's easy to rethink and design what someone did but the point i find is you don't have to spend 10 or so minutes changing things because it's themed for you. That's why I share mine anyway, it just makes it easier for someone to DL or do some minor changes to his liking. And to show off my crappy theming 

[ckizer]

I just want to make sure the author is looking far into the future. I get nervous about dedicating myself to a new app, if something superior will come along and replace it.

 

OS X 10.9 will be coming in the summer and from what I've already seen Apple is going to make key improvements to  the dock (as in biggest changes since launch of OS X) and to spotlight. They've taken notice of the Ubuntu “spotlight” style menus.

 

 

 

It's easy to rethink and design what someone did but the point i find is you don't have to spend 10 or so minutes changing things because it's themed for you. That's why I share mine anyway, it just makes it easier for someone to DL or do some minor changes to his liking. And to show off my crappy theming 

[Subject22]

And a cheeky little workflow to go with it.

 

http://cl.ly/MLMP

 

(Keyword: blur)

 

Thanks! Here's a version that automatically applies the blur setting by restarting Alfred (and his preferences, if they're open) as per my Restart Alfred workflow :-) As with Restart Alfred, you can have this workflow invoke your Alfred hotkey to make Alfred show himself after a successful restart (see the linked thread for details).

 

Download: Blur Alfred

Keyword: blur

Edited April 8, 2013 by Subject22

[Ddyracer]

I just want to make sure the author is looking far into the future. I get nervous about dedicating myself to a new app, if something superior will come along and replace it.

OS X 10.9 will be coming in the summer and from what I've already seen Apple is going to make key improvements to the dock (as in biggest changes since launch of OS X) and to spotlight. They've taken notice of the Ubuntu “spotlight” style menus.

Apple changed the Dock in ML, you really think they would tweak it even a tiny bit for 10.9? Before ML it was the same look since Leopard.

[derfla]

The blur hack seems to not working in OS X Mavericks at the moment.

[Jb_Bryant]

The blur hack seems to not working in OS X Mavericks at the moment.

 

Same here

[funkymonkey]

The blur hack seems to not working in OS X Mavericks at the moment.

 

Yup busted for me too.

[leefur]

+1 blur not working