Alfred 3.4 Released: Huge Snippets Improvements and New Workflow Object

Alfred 3.4 is a stunning release; It's so feature-filled, that it's challenging to summarise all the new additions in one blog post! We're sharing a few exciting highlights today, and will post tips and guides for using the new features over the next week or two.

The core of this release focuses on improvements to snippets and clipboard-related features. It includes date arithmetic, collection-wide prefixes and suffixes, improved batch editing of snippets, but this barely scratches the surface of what's new!

You'll also find a new Snippet Trigger object available for Workflows, which essentially means that you can now harness the power of a workflow within an auto expanding snippet.

You can grab Alfred 3.4 right now by updating in-app from the Update tab, or by downloading it from alfredapp.com.

Snippets and Text Expansion Improvements

A fun feature to get started with is the newly added date arithmetic for snippets and workflow objects, which means you can now include date and time calculations when processing text in Alfred.

As a very simple example, to paste tomorrow's date, your snippet would include {date +1d}.

To help you get started, you'll also find placeholder templates for date, time, clipboard content, arithmetic and more by clicking on the curly brackets at the bottom left of snippet and clipboard windows.

This release also adds the ability to set affixes for a snippet collection; Specify a unique character or a few as prefix (at the beginning) or suffix (at the end) to set it for the whole collection.

In this example, I've set :: as my prefix, so all keywords in that collection will automatically begin with these two colon punctuation marks.

You can also now batch enable and disable text expansion for snippets within a collection, or enable/disable entire snippet collections.

Beyond this, there have been under-the-hood improvements to give you the smoothest experience possible with snippets and clipboard features.

New Workflow Snippet Trigger Object

Along the same theme, we've added a new object to Workflows; the Snippet Trigger object.

The Snippet Trigger brings the power of Alfred's workflows to the text expansion feature; In other words, Alfred's text expansion can now be scripted and dynamic, making them more flexible than ever.

For example, you could use it to run a script that adds "Good morning!", "Good afternoon!" or "Good evening!" to a snippet before pasting, based on the time of day. You could also use it to run a script to include a random quote from a pre-established list before pasting your snippet.

Many more improvements and fixes

As well as these new features, many aspects of workflows, as well as the File System and iTunes, have seen some improvements in this release, so dig into the full change log for all the details.