David Ferguson

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.

Adding support for Extension Updater to your extensions

So you want to add Extension Updater for Alfred support to your extension? Don’t worry, it’s easy.

Below is a sample update XML. Create an update.xml file in your extension folder. The VERSION value is the value of the current extension. The URL value should be a url to another xml file on a remote server. I suggest using Github for storing the remote XML and extension download, but it doesn’t have to be there.

update.xml example
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”ISO-8859-1”?>
<update>
<version>1.0</version>
<url>https://example.com/extensions/appcast.xml</url>
</update>

After you have the update.xml file created and available, use the same format to create the appcast.xml. This file name can be changed to whatever you would like, as long as the update.xml file has the correct url. The VERSION value will be the version number of the updated extension. Please only use x.x versioning numbers since values are converted to float for comparison. The URL value in the remote xml file will be a url that links directly to the .alfredextension file on the remote server. This is the url used to download the extension. There is one more optional value you can add to the remote xml and that is a ‘COMMENTS’. When using the Extension Updater, if using the ‘check’ command, users are displayed a list of all extensions that have updates, and the comment if it is available.

appcast.xml example
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”ISO-8859-1”?>
<update>
<version>1.0</version>
<url>https://example.com/extensions/extension.alfredextension</url>
<comments>This update contains many fixes!</comments>
</update>

Once you have your extension uploaded remotely and have the xml files in place, users should be able to query the remote site for the current version and download the extension via the url provided. I would recommend not including files that store settings and such in the new extensions, as they would overwrite previous ones when installed. 

Github Hosting

If using Github to host your extensions and xml files, make sure you use the raw urls. If you do not, the updater will not work properly.

More examples?

Download and install some of my extensions and look at the update.xml file included. Look at the content, the link to the remote version, check out the content of that file, etc. Several of my extensions support the Extension Updater already including AlfredTweet, Wunderlist for Alfred, and my Weather extension.

Extension Updater for Alfred

Extension Updater 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

Extension Updater for Alfred is a simple extension that does what the name implies, it allows you to easily update your Alfred extensions. The extensions you have installed must be compatible with this extension to work properly. I will be adding another post on my tumblr soon on details of how to add support into your extensions. Currently, this extension will only update shell script extensions. Maybe I’ll add support for Applescripts later. This extension also, cannot currently update itself because the script can’t download and overwrite itself while its running. I’m looking into a workaround for that.

I have tested this extension, but there still may be a few bugs (none that I know of), so if you find something, please report it.

How to use

Extension Updater for Alfred’s commands are pretty simple and self explanatory. Here they are:

• update check - Check for new updates
• update - Check for updates, download and install updates found
• update help - Display the help menu
• update version - Display the current version of this extension
• update changelog - View extension changelog
• update about - View about info for this extension

Download

Download Extension Updater for Alfred

More Extensions

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

Install jQuery for Alfred

Install jQuery 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

This is a basic extension (result action) that will allow you to select a folder (using file navigation in Alfred, or via search) and then download and install the latest version of jQuery from Google CDN.

Download

Download Install jQuery for Alfred

More Extensions

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

Weather for Alfred - Updated

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

Weather for Alfred was completely rewritten. The primary source for gathering weather data before was through Gtwthr.com, another project of mine. Weather.com decided they would start charging a few hundred dollars a month for the kind of access to their API that I needed and I wasn’t going to pay that, so Gtwthr got scrapped (for now?). So, I rewrote the weather extension using Yahoo as the weather data source. I added a few new little data elements into it. The icon is still dynamic. I added a few new little things though. You can new search for your weather location id in the extension. This makes it really easy to find your location id for Yahoo. Also, you can set a default location, but then you can also specify a location as well. Let’s check out the commands.

UPDATED Nov 23:

In the previous release I completely forgot about having the ability to set a temperature unit. My bad guys. The extension has been updated to version 1.5 now and has the ability to set a default location and temp unit. Check the changelog for other stuff.

How to use

Weather for Alfred’s commands are pretty simple and self explanatory. Here they are:

• weather <location id> - Displays weather data for the provided location
• weather search <location> - Search for your location id
• weather location <location id> - Set the default location
• weather unit <unit> - Set default temp unit (f or c)
• weather - (Req. Alfred 1.0 or newer), Displays weather for the default location
• weather about - About the extension
• weather help - Display the help menu
• weather version - Display the current version of the extension
• weather changelog - Display the changelog

Download

Download Weather for Alfred

More Extensions

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

Wunderlist 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

Wunderlist for Alfred is a simple little extension that provides very basic interaction with Wunderlist for Mac. At this point, the only functionality that exists in this extension is adding new tasks to the Inbox list, and listing tasks in Wunderlist. I’ve been talking back and forth with some of the developers at Wunderlist and have decided that it is probably best to leave it simple for now. Hopefully the guys at 6Wunderkinder will release an API soon and I will be able to stretch this extension out some. The reason the extension is so limited right now is because of the lack of a 3rd party interface to Wunderlist. To get this extension to work at all, I’m simply editing their local database file.

How to use

Wunderlist for Alfred’s commands are pretty simple and self explanatory. Here they are:

• wl <text> - Creates a new task in Wunderlist
• wl tasks - Lists all tasks in the Inbox list
• wl all tasks - Lists all tasks in all lists
• wl - No parameter list all tasks in all lists. This requires Alfred 1.0 pre-release or newer.

Download

Download Wunderlist for Alfred

More Extensions

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

Color Converter 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!

What is Color Converter?

I could be going crazy but I think a week or two ago a user had asked for an extension to convert hex color codes to rgb. I got a wild hair today and decided to make it. After getting input from a few other guys on Twitter, I decided to make the extension do the reverse as well (rgb to hex) and provide customization on the output format of the rgb values. So here we go..

How to use Color Converter

• cc [hex] - returns the value in rgb
• cc [rgb] - returns the value in hex
• cc format [text format] - sets the rgb output format
• cc help - displays the help menu
• cc about - displays info about the extension
• cc version - displays the current version of the extension
• cc changelog - displays the changelog for the extension

When setting the rgb output format, just use a simple sting and place %r, %g, %b in the position you would like to have the values placed. So, for instance, if you wanted to set the output format to be a css rgb value, you would use “cc format rgb(%r,%g,%b)”. This would result in an output from “cc #ecff8a” to be “rgb(236,255,138);”. These results are shown in Growl and are automatically copied to the clipboard as well.

Download

Download Color Converter

More Extensions

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

Upcoming Extension for Alfred (hint)

This is more of a giveaway than it is a hint. It’s another extension (really kind of a framework) I’m working on though that will help all extension developers.

Updated Screenshot Extension

Several users requested a timestamp in the filename when grabbing screenshots so older screenshots wouldn’t be overwritten. Well, here it is. Filenames are formatted exactly the same as OS X screenshots. “Screenshot <date> at <time>”

Download