Date & time workflow

[bedartha]

I often end up in a situation when my entire screen is covered with windows and the tiny analog clock on the menu bar is just too hard to decipher. Plus, I guess it's safe to say that all of us hate using the mouse or the trackpad on those over-work days (hence Alfred!  ).So I decided to make a most basic workflow using the "date" command of the Terminal.

 

There are two keywords: 'date' and 'time'.

On actioning these keywords, the current date and time (respectively) are displayed on the screen using the "Large Type" output mode.

That's it!

(oh, one more thing - I use the word "Clock" for the search result to avoid conflict with "Date & Time" of "System Preferences")

 

Here are a few screenshots:

• date keyword
• date output
• time keyword
• time output

 

 

NOTE: Although it is not apparent from the screenshots, the large type output is actually transparentso it does not really cover your screen with a completely opaque black panel! And a press of the Esc key is all that's required to get it out of sight.

You can download the workflow from here:

https://github.com/bedartha/DateTime

 

 

I hope you guys like it.

 

- Bedartha

[bedartha]

Hi again everyone,

 

Sadly, my earlier post did not get any views. I guess this functionality of viewing the date & time with alfred keywords is either too simple or rather unneeded.

Still, I went ahead and included one more functionality, viz., to display the current month in calendar form using LargeType output.

 

The updated workflow can be found on the same GitHub repo: https://github.com/bedartha/DateTime

 

One thing that would have been a great feature - is that if it was possible to customize the font settings for the LargeType output. I really like the idea of LargeType and use it quite often but since the font used currently in LargeType is not fixedwidth - I had to spend an entire day meddling around with hyphens and spaces and tabs and what not in python to display the calendar correctly. Even now, the output is a bit hackish. This entire task could have been just one command: "cal" using /bin/bash and with a MonoSpaced font.

 

I hope we are able to change the font in LargeType in future Alfred versions!

 

Cheers!

Bedartha

[bedartha]

I am sorry for mentioning that the first post here did not get "any" view. I was looking at something else - my bad - it does seem to have around 851 views.

[bedartha]

hi zuzung,

 

i am not so sure. i simply use the "date" command in the script. it all depends whether the date command can output the current date/time info in local lonaguage. i tried looking around but could not find anything to that effect.

 

the "month" script - on the other hand - has some promise to this issue. check out: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040625094428394