David Ferguson

Wunderlist Extension

I honestly don’t “check” my Tumblr stuff often. I primarily just use it to post and forget. I just noticed I have several messages from people asking for help with the Wunderlist extension, saying that when they installed it, it couldn’t find the database. I haven’t touched the Wunderlist extension in a while but I will try to get back into it sometime within the next week or so and see if I can make it more accurate at detecting the path to the database. I actually don’t remember how I was doing it originally, but I may see if I can’t work some extra magic with mdfind and such to see if I can use Spotlight to actually find it, and then set the path that way.

So, if you were having trouble with the Wunderlist extension, keep watching here for an update and I’ll try to get things fixed.

Find tagged files with Alfred

I have been a TotalFinder user for a long time but recently decided to give Path Finder another try. One of the first things that caught my eye was the file tagging functionality built into Path Finder. The first thing that came to mind after was, I wonder if this is something Alfred indexes? By default, the answer is no, but that’s what extensions are for, right?

So, to get Alfred to search the file tags, create a new Search Filter. Name it, give it a description, set your keyword, give it a scope if you want. Next, lets click the Advanced button above the File Types box. In there, click the + button to add a new Metadata Field. Then start typing kMDItemOMUserTags for the field name (it will autocomplete). It should look like this.

Now you can close this window and save your Filter. Now pop open Alfred, type your keyword and start searching for files based on their tags. Easy right?

Setting up Wolfram Alpha for Alfred

Intro

When I initially released the Wolfram extension for Alfred, I didn’t realize how popular it would be. Before long, the extension died because Wolfram killed my API key due to excessive use. Oops. Sorry Wolfram.

This post will show you how to create your own app id and get the Wolfram Alpha extension for Alfred working.

The Process

First, head over to wolframalpha.com. Pretty colors eh? Click the “For Developers” link at the bottom of the page.

Next you want to “Get Started”

Then you want to sign up. This doesn’t cost anything. It creates you an account and gives you a develops app id.

Next, fill out all of your info and click the “Sign Up” button to create your account.

Now that you have created an account and are logged in, click the “Get an AppID” button

Fill in your app name, it can be whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. Submit the info and there you go.. You have a new AppID

Now go to the directory where your Alfred extensions are installed. The easy to get to them is to bring up Alfred, press cmd+, to get the preferences, then go to the Extensions tab, find the Wolfram extension, right click it, and select Show In Finder.

Find the wolfram.php script and open it in a text editor. Find the line that looks like this:

$url = “http://api.wolframalpha.com/v2/query?input=$q&appid=JXULYW-L3J2U64VTE”;

It should be somewhere around line 34. Replace the appid value in the url with the new AppID you just created, save, and Wolfram should work.

Quick start a new iMessage from Alfred using the new Messages app

I was looking around at the new Messages (beta) this morning and just because I’m curious, got to looking through the Info.plist. Yes, I’m that kind of nerd. :) Guess what I found… an iMessage URL scheme. I don’t know if this has been mentioned elsewhere yet..

So what does that mean? As of Alfred 1.1 you can set specific actions when selecting data in the Alfred contact viewer. So, if you want to quickly create an iMessage to a contact from Alfred, go to Preferences->Features->Address Book and on the Phone option, select Pass to URL Scheme, then set the scheme to “imessage:{query}”

Once you have that set, press your hotkey to bring up Alfred (mine is Cmd+Space), search for a contact, select one, press Enter, select the phone number that they can receive iMessages on, and press Enter.

If you use things like Google Talk, you can do the same thing with Google contacts. Go to Preferences->Features->Address Book and go to the Messaging tab. Find the Google Talk option, set the action to Pass to URL Scheme and set the URL to im:{query}.

There are also URLs for aim:, ichat:, and xmpp:.

EDIT:

This post is still valid for information purposes but it has come to my attention and been brought up by other users that the setup mentioned above doesn’t work for all phone numbers. I believe its numbers that have been added since the introduction of iCloud are formatted differently where the area code is in ()’s and there is a space between the area code and the prefix. When using the method described above on a phone number formatted that way, it doesn’t work because iMessage doesn’t remove all the escape characters. The easiest way to get around this was to simply make an extension that strips out the slashes used for escaping and to remove the space in the number.

The extension is available here. So, instead of setting the Address Book area to ‘Pass to URL Scheme’, import this extension and tell it to run this extension instead. The extension could also be used to allow you to quick enter a number if you chose. It currently doesn’t have a keyword set to it, but i believe if you just add a keyword (‘im’ for example) then you could enter into Alfred: ‘im 555-555-0123’ and it should create a new iMessage to that number. You don’t have to include the hyphens, I just added those to make it easier to read.

QuickSnip for Alfred

Introduction

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. The Powerpack is a set of incredibly powerful features, built on top of the robust core of Alfred. Deeply integrated with OS X, it will make you more productive that ever!

Description

QuickSnip for Alfred is a simple little extension that allows you to quickly create new snippets for Alfred using the main input window. The first word entered beyond the extension keyword, is the word that will be used for the Name and Keyword values for the snippet. Anything beyond that is the snippet.

The script attempts to find you sync folder if it exists and finds the snippets database there. If not sync folder is set (using local settings) then the script will fall back to using the local snippets database.

Example

With the extension command set to qs (for QuickSnip), type:

qs alfred alfredapp.com
qs df David Ferguson
qs diap Don is a punk - Where @binaryghost is the Don being referenced

These obviously add new snippets where the first word is the keyword, anything beyond is the snippet text. 

Download

Download QuickSnip for Alfred

More Extensions

For more of my extensions and many others, check out the new Alfred Support site.

Alfred Tasks: Task Manager for Alfred

Introduction

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. The Powerpack is a set of incredibly powerful features, built on top of the robust core of Alfred. Deeply integrated with OS X, it will make you more productive that ever!

Description

Alfred Tasks is a simple task/todo manager for Alfred. All interaction is handled with Alfred and Growl. Growl is required for this extension. You can create tasks and groups, set default task groups, remove tasks, etc, all right from the keyboard.

Commands

Alfred Tasks’ commands are very easy to learn. Here they are:

do <t> - Create new task in the default group
do <g> <t> - Create a new task in the specified group
do list - List all tasks in the default group
do list all - List all tasks in all groups
do list <g> - List all tasks in a specified group
do group <g> - Create a new group
do rename <g> <new> - Rename specified group
do default <g> - Set specified group to be default
do rem <g> - Delete the specified group
do rem <g> <#> - Remove specified task number from specified group
do rem <g> all - Remove all tasks from specified group

If only one group exists, you do not need to specify the group to remove a task from. Alfred Tasks will default back to the default group. 

Other commands

do help - Display the help menu
do about - Display info about this extension
do version - Display the extension version
do changelog  - Display the extension changelog

Download

Download Alfred Tasks

More Extensions

For more of my extensions and many others, check out the new Alfred Support site.