Assorted feature requests

[segphault]

Some feature requests that I documented over the weekend while writing my first workflow:

 

• Ability to buffer input for script filters (Wait until user is finished typing before calling script)
  • Usage scenario: more reliable usage of web script filters that hit slow web APIs (e.g. GitHub repo search)
• Debugging tools for script filters, or at least a mechanism that lets me see stdout
  • Usage scenario: It'd be great to be able to know if my Python script raised an exception or emitted bad XML.
• Allow keyboard shortcut to open Alfred file browser at a certain path
  • Usage scenario: cmd+ctrl+shift+d to browse ~/Dropbox.
  • I was able to do this in previous version of Alfred, but can't find v2 equivalent
• Allow keyboard shortcut to pass arbitrary text string as arg
  • Usage scenario: I want to have keyboard shortcuts for my Hue workflow that set the value to 0 or 255 (highest and lowest brightness)
• Support JSON output for script filters
  • XML is a pain to generate and properly encode. Serializing a dictionary into JSON from Python is much easier.
• Add an option that enables piping to script actions so that we have the choice of reading from stdin instead of using {query}.
  • Usage scenario: this would be desirable for things like my markdown processor where I'm potentially taking a large amount of arbitrary text as input
• A way to name scripts actions (or provide some other way to make them easily distinguishable)
  • Usage scenario: If I have several in a workflow, it's sometimes hard to find the one I'm actually looking for
• Hotkey option for "selected text OR clipboard" that will use clipboard as input when no text is selected.
  • Usage scenario: this is something that I wanted for my Markdown workflow so that I don't have to have two separate shortcuts.

Thanks!

[segphault]

One more: 

• Make it so that you can assign a custom fallback for a specific file/script filter
  • Usage scenario: when Evernote file filter finds no matching note, execute AppleScript that passes query to Evernote app's built-in search

[rkj]

+1 for JSON output for script filter feedback!

[simonbs]

I would also like to see support for JSON as output for script filters.

[jdfwarrior]

In response to suggestion 1 and 2..

 

1. I started restricting string length on searches. That may help a little. If a search string is less than 3-4 characters, don't execute.

2. Andrew and I discussed something similar to this at one point but not sure something like this would make it to v2.0

 

Great ideas though!

[segphault]

Thanks for the response, David! Waiting for 3-4 characters before executing a script filter will definitely help a lot. 

[untidey]

I like a lot of those ideas, in particular:

 

- input buffer for script filters

- JSON encoding of script filter output

- selected text or clipboard argument for hotkeys

 

and while I the topic of the third:

 

'selected text', 'clipboard' and 'selected text OR clipboard' options for keyword inputs

'selected finder items' arguments for hotkeys and keywords

 

[PaulCapestany]

+1 to be able to use JSON w/ script filters

[canadaduane]

+1 to JSON output for script filters. XML is heavy.

[PaulCapestany]

How likely is it that we might see the JSON feature request implemented anytime in the near future? 

 

I bet a lot more great workflows would get made with that in place. Can't overstate that being able to avoid the extra hassle of converting stuff over to XML would be a huge boon (especially for people who aren't using the Python or PHP Alfred libs that are already out there... I personally would be using Go for building my workflows)

[jdfwarrior]

I dont see how converting stuff over to xml is so much more challenging than json? Also, granted you would have to go through the work of making it initially but i made a function that accepts an array or a json object and converts it to the correct xml.