So How Do I Upgrade from V1?

[shuntera]

I downloaded Alfred 2 and see it has a different aopplication file name so it does not upgrade the Alfred.app binary.

 

So how do I start using ALfred 2 and import all my custom searches?

 

I am a Powerpack user for both version.

 

 

Andrew: Quick update - 2.0.1 has now been released which has an Import button in Alfred's General Preferences

[albertkinng]

we are on the same boat my friend... I have so much in my old Alfred that it will be a headache if they answer I need to start all over again.

[bbrown]

I've got tons of hotkeys set up, AppleScripts mapped, extensions added, and other minor customizations done like custom searches. From what I gather, migration from v1 to v2 wasn't a priority and we're told that there might be a one-time workflow created to accomplish this. I was an early adopter of Alfred, bought the first Power Pack, and immediately bought the v2 one as soon as I heard.

 

I'm supposed to dutifully migrate each hotkey from the simple interface in Alfred v1 over to the Workflow system in v2? Forget all of the extensions I had before and search for new workflows? Manually and tediously copy over my AppleScripts? I'm looking over the "Templates" in Workflows and it took me two tries to find one to make a global hotkey open an app. The old interface was drop-dead simple: drag app into the Global Hotkey pane, pick a hotkey, and finished. It was delightful.

 

Long story short, I am *not* manually importing all this. Figure this out or I'm getting a refund.

 

Bill

[ctwise]

I downloaded Alfred 2 and see it has a different aopplication file name so it does not upgrade the Alfred.app binary.

 

So how do I start using ALfred 2 and import all my custom searches?

 

I am a Powerpack user for both version.

 

http://dferg.us/migrate-custom-searches-and-snippets/

[albertkinng]

I've got tons of hotkeys set up, AppleScripts mapped, extensions added, and other minor customizations done like custom searches. From what I gather, migration from v1 to v2 wasn't a priority and we're told that there might be a one-time workflow created to accomplish this. I was an early adopter of Alfred, bought the first Power Pack, and immediately bought the v2 one as soon as I heard.

 

I'm supposed to dutifully migrate each hotkey from the simple interface in Alfred v1 over to the Workflow system in v2? Forget all of the extensions I had before and search for new workflows? Manually and tediously copy over my AppleScripts? I'm looking over the "Templates" in Workflows and it took me two tries to find one to make a global hotkey open an app. The old interface was drop-dead simple: drag app into the Global Hotkey pane, pick a hotkey, and finished. It was delightful.

 

Long story short, I am *not* manually importing all this. Figure this out or I'm getting a refund.

 

Bill

 

I'm with you.

 

If I wanted something complicated i just get a copy of Quicksilver or Launchbar but I choose Alfred for the simplicity to add complicated tasks. now it seems I bought V2 and I don't know where to start. 

 

and I mean I received a receipt but never the serial number!! and that's just the start!

[jdfwarrior]

I'm with you.

 

If I wanted something complicated i just get a copy of Quicksilver or Launchbar but I choose Alfred for the simplicity to add complicated tasks. now it seems I bought V2 and I don't know where to start. 

 

and I mean I received a receipt but never the serial number!! and that's just the start!

 

As ctwise mentioned, check my blog, http://dferg.us, I've got a workflow available that will allow you to transfer snippets and custom searches from v1 to v2.

 

Alfred preferences are completely rewritten and structured very differently than the original. If you have any issues, please post back here so we can follow the progress and help you out.

 

Thanks

[shuntera]

http://dferg.us/migrate-custom-searches-and-snippets/

 

Excellent work sir, that worked perfectly for me. Thanks very much.

[JohnR]

I'm confused.  I got this email giving me my code with no links or instruction on how to upgrade.

Can someone please tell how to upgrade to V2?

 

Thanks,

 

John

[bbrown]

Alfred preferences are completely rewritten and structured very differently than the original. If you have any issues, please post back here so we can follow the progress and help you out.

 

So is that the last, official word here? Snippets and custom searches can be migrated but everything else I mentioned (AppleScripts, settings themselves, hotkeys, extensions) are left up to the customer to tediously migrate?

 

I'm a software developer myself and it seems bizarre to me that a migration path wasn't part of the original design.

 

Bill

[jdfwarrior]

I'm confused.  I got this email giving me my code with no links or instruction on how to upgrade.

Can someone please tell how to upgrade to V2?

 

Thanks,

 

John

 

Alfred 2 is a new app and doesn't update directly from v1. Download Alfred 2 from the web site and use your new license to activate it

[jdfwarrior]

So is that the last, official word here? Snippets and custom searches can be migrated but everything else I mentioned (AppleScripts, settings themselves, hotkeys, extensions) are left up to the customer to tediously migrate?

 

I'm a software developer myself and it seems bizarre to me that a migration path wasn't part of the original design.

 

Bill

 

Most extensions and other items can be easily added or set back up, even the extensions using the workflow templates provided. If you need any assistance with it, I would be more than happy to help

[bbrown]

I've got 10 scripts, 8 AppleScripts, and 7 global hotkeys plus all of the settings customizations. I am going to have Alfred and Alfred 2 open simultaneously and visually go through each of these (plus test them out) to make them match assuming that I don't have to comb through your help or wait for forum support to find things that don't obviously match between versions. My usage data ("Since January 28, 2011, Alfred has been used 12,440 times. Average 16.0 times per day.") is gone.

 

Multiply that experience by 10% of your customer base (guesstimate of how many customized to that extent beyond your snippets/searchs workflow migrator) and you've got a lot of unpaid wasting of customers' time. It's obviously cheaper to you than having a developer build in a migration plan from the get-go but it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. If you pull this crap in v3, I will not be paying again and will go back to Quicksilver.

 

As a side note, putting that custom searches migration workflow in a forum reply and linking to a guy's blog is bad form. That tool would be immensely useful to anyone that had custom searches and snippets. Why couldn't you have put it somewhere within the tool itself or off the upgrade page. Or heck, have an upgrade to v2 page linked off support?

 

(I've been an Alfred user for two years and I have personally gotten at least three people passionately hooked on Alfred in that time and an unknown number advocating on Twitter and elsewhere. v2 feels rushed to market and Running with Crayons seems less customer-focused than it has in the past. Take that for what it's worth.)

 

Bill

[Andrew]

Alfred v2 is a complete rewrite from the ground up. I would have loved to have given a full migration path from v1 to v2, but it would have added a good month to the development of Alfred when 99% of users wanted v2 months ago.

 

v2 is significantly easier to use than v1, with workflows replacing many separate and segmented parts of Alfred into a simple and single place. In most cases, a script extension can be replaced with a keyword input -> script action, but many can't. Many of the 3rd party extensions are out of date and broken too.

 

bbrown - we aren't linking to some guys blog - David is part of the Alfred team and created these migrations for our users.

[Vero]

I've got 10 scripts, 8 AppleScripts, and 7 global hotkeys plus all of the settings customizations. I am going to have Alfred and Alfred 2 open simultaneously and visually go through each of these (plus test them out) to make them match assuming that I don't have to comb through your help or wait for forum support to find things that don't obviously match between versions. My usage data ("Since January 28, 2011, Alfred has been used 12,440 times. Average 16.0 times per day.") is gone.

 

Hi Bill,

 

In addition to what Andrew and David have both said, it's worth adding that we deliberated for a long time and created numerous scenarios before coming to this decision. Eventually, we decided that importing extensions into workflows requires human intelligence to ensure that you make the most of the v2 workflows, which are significantly more advanced.  Automatically importing old, often outdated scripts was tantamount to a bad patch-up job.

 

For example, an old script probably had a Growl script rolled into it, making it difficult for you to change how notifications happen, while a new workflow allows you to use a much more modular Post Notification output.

 

Remember that there's no rush as you can keep running Alfred v1 and v2 concurrently until you're ready to migrate your workflows or until the developers of particular extensions you love have been turned into workflows.

 

Running with Crayons is still run by Andrew and myself, with the help of David Ferguson (jdfwarrior) who provides wonderful help with workflows and user questions, as well as our two cats Jack and Rose. We still absolutely love our users and care about them, and it's with this in mind that we decided to take the path we have. I hope this clarifies things.

 

Thanks,

Vero

[JohnR]

 

Thanks, got it.  Bummed my Things and QuickCAL scripts no longer work. Anyone know where I can get new ones

that work with version 2?

[leefur]

I'm with the OP on this. While there are certainly plenty of unmappable pieces, there remain a ton of equivalent checkboxes and such, and Alfred's preferences are deep and wide indeed. This is exactly the sort of work that computers are good at, and it is surprising to see this not handled elegantly in Alfred. This might be the first time I've been surprised in a bad way by Alfred. That's an awfully good track record.

[aloyr]

while an upgrade path would have been nice, the fact that you can run both side-by-side, assign a different shortcut key to alf-2 and migrate at your own pace is pretty nice. or maybe you don't need to upgrade at all. i did upgrade, got the powerpack and plan to migrate slowly, as time permits.

[jdfwarrior]

I'm with the OP on this. While there are certainly plenty of unmappable pieces, there remain a ton of equivalent checkboxes and such, and Alfred's preferences are deep and wide indeed. This is exactly the sort of work that computers are good at, and it is surprising to see this not handled elegantly in Alfred. This might be the first time I've been surprised in a bad way by Alfred. That's an awfully good track record.

 

It's a little more than having some of the same options. The preferences for v2 are built completely different, organized differently, and named differently internally. Extensions are still a plist but there is a LOT to it. Trust me, I attempted to create a workflow for migrating extensions as well. It's a HUGE task. Small things in v1 extensions have to be transformed into the individual modules for v2, form all the connections, set all the settings, etc. As mentioned by Andrew himself, adding this one thing would have set the release back significantly. Converting a v1 extension to a workflow yourself is a rather trivial task.

[leefur]

Hey guys – 

 

Thanks for the thoughtful replies. 

 

I see how this would be more complex than I could imagine, being a designer (and not a developer) with no familiarity with the guts of the thing. I wouldn't press for a full Alfred setup migration. But it does seem like a fair amount of non-advanced-user setup migration could have happened, as a lot of the basic options were moved around in the re-organized Preferences. They still exist, they're just somewhere else. It feels like with 20% of the effort you might've been able to get 80% of the benefit (given that the people you talk to most are the most advanced of Alfred users, who have more that would be difficult to migrate, I wonder if these percentages feel more different than they would truly be).

 

Anyway, yall are delightful and I will continue to preach the gospel of Alfred.

[leefur]

Oh, and running both apps side-by-side is a total non-solution. Using duplicate productivity apps which have 95% functionality overlap is paradoxical.

[leefur]

Also, I have Alfred running on two computers… since all the setup is manual, this really is going to be quite a process.

[jdfwarrior]

Also, I have Alfred running on two computers… since all the setup is manual, this really is going to be quite a process.

 

Not really. If you set up syncing on Alfred 2 then, as you set up one machine, the other will get synced.

 

Also, migrating a v1 extension to v2 is really easy. The easiest was to perform this is to open Alfred preferences, head to the Workflows tab. Once you are there, click the + in the bottom of the Workflows list on the left side. Go to the Templates->Essentials and select Keyword to Script. That is the equivalent of creating an extension in Alfred 1. Double click the keyword item to set the title, subtitle, and keyword, then Save that. Double click the script item, and then paste the v1 extension code into the Script area and Save. This may not work perfectly for the more advanced extensions but will cover the majority of them.

[rickroberts]

Thanks, but I’ll stick with v1. It’s ridiculous that v2 doesn’t read prefs from v1. No way am I about to put a bunch of time into customizing it to make it work as well as v1works for me. 

[jdfwarrior]

Thanks, but I’ll stick with v1. It’s ridiculous that v2 doesn’t read prefs from v1. No way am I about to put a bunch of time into customizing it to make it work as well as v1works for me. 

 

We can understand your frustration but using the templates mentioned my my post above, most extensions can be migrated quickly and easily. Also, as mentioned in some of my previous posts, Alfred 2 and the preferences were a complete rewrite of the original. They are structured, written, and stored completely different from the original. If you need help migrating anything over, I'd be happy to assist you.

[ecpete]

Hi, everybody!

I am an Alfred v1 user and bought the v1 Powerpack, is that license still valid for the c2 Powerpack or do I have to buy the new one? 

Thanks beforehand

Peter