A few weeks ago, a few members of the Campaign Monitor team teased us with a cheeky picture of a mysterious purple box winging its way to us. "What might it contain?", we wondered.
This week, the box arrived containing an absolutely gorgeous handmade wool bowler hat to celebrate Alfred's 4th birthday. It's even got Alfred's purple ribbon!
It's difficult for me to write about Campaign Monitor without sounding like an advertisement, but there aren't many tools out there I look forward to using as much as their email platform. You see, for many years, before Alfred was born, I sent campaigns every day using badly designed, antiquated tools - and I still bear the scars! Switching to Campaign Monitor has made creating and sending email campaigns so much more pleasant that I haven't looked back in about 8 years.
My favourite part of the newsletter process comes after I've hit the "send" button (holding my breath, hoping I haven't forgotten anything). I'm rewarded with the Worldview report, where I can watch pins drop all over the world as you lovely people open our email and click on links. It never gets old to see real-time stats - and yes, I do wave as I recognise the names and faces of our long-time users popping up!
Beyond the technology, the people who are behind Campaign Monitor are inspiring, fun and mighty clever - something you can sense through every interaction with them and the product.
On the subject of newsletters, you're already subscribed to our Alfred newsletter, aren't you? You can subscribe to our newsletter in the footer or in Alfred's General preferences tab in-app. We only send a few emails a year, and I promise, we've got some very nice surprises for you this year.
Cheers,
Vero
In recent weeks, we've published a few posts on some of our favourite Alfred workflows. Some are very simple and others are more complex, but they're all created using Alfred's building blocks, the workflow objects.
This tutorial will help you understand what a workflow is, how to import an existing Alfred workflow and set it up to get started with it.
What are workflows?
Alfred has an extensive set of features, both in the free core version - searching your Mac and the web, calculations, dictionary - and in the Powerpack - clipboard, theming, iTunes Mini Player and more.
Yet, we know that you like to customise things even more and control your Mac even more deeply. This is where workflows come in; This Powerpack feature allows you to speed up repetitive tasks and save time by performing many actions at once, even if you're the only person in the world who needs to perform that task. Who doesn't want to get work done more efficiently?
You can import workflows created by fellow Alfred users and you can create your own. Here, we'll look at importing existing workflows and setting them up. In the next tutorial, we'll look at creating your own from scratch and sharing them with friends.
You'll find workflows in various places on the web:
- On this blog, where we often feature some of our favourite workflows
- On Packal, a fantastic repository for workflows and themes, created by Alfred user Shawn Patrick Rice
- On the Alfred community forum, where many users share their workflows & discuss their ideas
- Developers of other Mac apps have created workflows, so you'll find many more by searching for workflows and the name of your favourite Mac apps
You can also download the very simple file filtering workflow I'm using as example in this tutorial.
Remember that you need to be a Powerpack user in order to use advanced features like workflows, so be sure to activate your license or purchase a license to get started with workflows.
Importing a Workflow
Once you've found a workflow you like, you can simply install workflows by double-clicking the workflow file. The workflow files end with .alfredworkflow.
You can add the workflow to a category, then click "Import" to finish importing. You'll now see the workflow listed in the left sidebar of your Workflows preferences pane.
Occasionally, you might come across Alfred extensions (ending in .alfredextension); These are the precursors to workflows and date back from Alfred version 1. You won't be able to import these directly into version 2, but you'll find that the most popular ones have been re-published as v2 workflows by their creators.
Setting Up Your Workflow
Once imported, most features of your workflow will work instantly. A quick look at the workflow will show you what keywords you can use.
In this example, the keywords are "new" and "old". Typing the keywords into Alfred will show you what action you can perform with them. In this example, the keyword "new" allows you to filter files to only show documents you've modified in the last 3 days.
Where workflows contain hotkeys, the hotkeys are stripped out when you import the workflow, to ensure that these don't clash with your existing hotkeys. You can set these easily by double-clicking the hotkey object to show the drop-down where you can set your hotkey.
Hit save, and that's your hotkey set!
What's next?
The world's your oyster, son! You can add workflow objects and connect them together to add more ways to search your files. You can change keywords and hotkeys to suit your needs. Or you can modify the file filter by double-clicking it to change what file types are searched or the search scope to search only specific folders on your Mac.
Over the past few weeks, we featured a few of the apps we really love using with Alfred. While working on each one of these posts, I was listening to music using the service I'm featuring today: Spotify.
To say that we use Spotify a lot would probably be an understatement. At the end of 2013, Spotify released a "Your year in review" page, where you could see some mind blowing aggregate stats for its millions of users, the year's most popular Monday songs, as well as some of your own usage metrics. Ahem, it turns out that we listened to over 30 non-stop days of Spotify music over 2013.
It's fair to say that Spotify pretty much fuels our week musically. Some clever Alfred users created workflows that gives you control of Spotify on your Mac. There are a number of great workflows, and below are two popular ones; a simpler one and a more advanced one, depending on how you like your workflows!
Remember that you'll need a Powerpack license in order to use workflows.
A Simple Workflow: Spotifious
Spotifious by Ben Stolovitz is a great yet simple workflow that allows you to search and browse music on Spotify. Once you've set your hotkey, you can bring it up to see what's currently playing and browse Spotify's catalog.
It's brilliant and requires no setup at all, other than using an up-to-date version of the Spotify app for Mac. The only downside is that searching can only be as fast as Spotify can respond to your query, so you sometimes have to wait a moment before your results appear.
Download the Spotifious workflow from Packal.
An Advanced Workflow: Spotify Mini Player
This workflow is Vincent de Saboulin's Spotify Mini Player and gives you an even smoother search experience for your Spotify playlists, including showing artwork thumbnails as you browse.
It requires a bit of legwork to get started as you'll need to sign up for a (free) Spotify developer account, but once you're up and running, it's the quickest and prettiest way to search. After setting up the workflow, it took roughly an hour for my library to be scanned and the artwork to be downloaded, but the results were beautifully presented and very fast.
Download the Spotify Mini Player workflow from Packal.
For those who can't use Spotify yet
As Spotify isn't available in all countries, those who are still waiting for the service to launch in their country can choose from the wealth of great workflows for other music services.
For example, users have created workflows for Last.fm and Rdio, and there is of course, Alfred's integrated iTunes Mini Player.
What's your favourite guilty pleasure song? If you tell me yours, maybe I'll tell you mine ;)
Over the past few weeks, we featured a few of the apps we really love using with Alfred. Today, it's an app I simply couldn't live without: 1Password.
Not familiar with it? 1Password is an immensely helpful app in an era where we require passwords for every site we use, yet our memory can only hold so many at once. It allows you to contain all your passwords, credit cards, license codes and secret world takeover plans behind one master password. With a convenient iOS app, a browser plugin on your Mac and Alfred integration, it's quick and effortless to log in to your favourite sites.
The integration with Alfred uses the 1Click Bookmarks to present you with the sites you can log in to when you type "1p" followed by your search term.
Enabling 1Password Bookmarks
There are a few steps to take to get started. Note that you'll need a Powerpack license for Alfred and 1Password installed to use this feature.
The first step is to install the 1Password browser plugin for your favourite web browser.
Enabling integration in 1Password (For 1Password 4 users only)
If you're using 1Password 4 (released October 2013), perform this step. If you're using 1Password 3, jump to the "Enabling 1Password integration in Alfred". Open 1Password's preferences to the Advanced tab and check the box that says "Enable integration with 3rd party apps". This is essential for Alfred to be able to read your 1Password bookmarks.
Enabling 1Password integration in Alfred
For users of all versions, in Alfred's Features > 1Password preferences, enable 1Password bookmarks by checking the box. You'll now be able to launch your bookmarks by typing "1p" followed by the name of your bookmark.
See? There's no need for Post-it notes with scribbled passwords, or heads filled with half-forgotten passwords. This is the quickest way to launch and log in to your favourite websites, all while keeping you perfectly secure. :)
Today's Alfred v2.2 release contains some major improvements to workflows, which will be very enjoyable for both developers and workflow users.
We've added new organisation, filtering and copying options for workflows, so that your growing collection is easier to sort through. A key feature for workflow developers is also the new debugging options to help them create the best workflows possible.
Of course, the list doesn't end there; v2.2 includes loads of significant improvements to many other areas of Alfred. Fancy reading all of the improvements? The change log contains a detailed list, but we've included a few highlights for you below.
Workflow Debugging
The debugging tool is a new addition to help developers create and improve the awe-inspiring collection of workflows they've made available to fellow Alfred users.
To access debugging, click the bug icon when editing a workflow; Logs will appear as the workflow is used and information can be filtered to show either all information or only the errors and warnings.
Categorising and Copying Workflows
As we each start collecting an impressive number of workflows, it becomes increasingly useful to categorise them. In this release, you can use the few default categories or create your own, then classify your workflows into "work", "productivity", "music", etc categories and filter down by category. Click on the triangle in the search field of the Workflows search to get started.
We've also made it easier to copy and paste workflow objects from one workflow to another with Cmd + C to copy and Cmd + V to paste. You can also duplicate a whole workflow, if you want to re-use a workflow as a basis to create a new one!
You can update to v2.2 by going to the "Update" tab in Alfred's Preferences or by downloading Alfred from our website. Have a look at the change log for the full list of improvements and fixes in this release.
