Tag Archives: quicksilver

Alfred 2 Workflows

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I was a huge Quicksilver fan until I switched to Alfred. When QS went 1.0 I gave it another shot, but I still preferred Alfred. Alfred 2 got even better with the introduction of workflows. Workflow requires the Powerpack, and it’s definitely worth it.

I’ve been using Alfred 2 for a few months now, and these are the workflows I depend on:

Productivity

  • prepend to memo. I keep a memo.txt file on Dropbox, I use Drafts in iOS to prepend to it, I wanted to do the same with Alfred so I hacked up this workflow. Edit the script inside the workflow to change the destination. (now it prepends to ~/Dropbox/Notes/memo.txt)
  • quick focus on contact in Messages. It quickly focuses on a contact in Messages, very useful if you have a ton of open conversations.
  • dial with iphone. If you have Prowl on your iPhone, this workflow sends a phone number to your phone so you can dial it quickly with a single tap. You can also integrate it with the Alfred built-in contacts browser.
  • Recent Documents
  • Do Things. Quickly add tasks to Things.
  • Pocket. I switched to Pocket as my *-it-later service a while back, this workflow adds stuff to Pocket quickly.
  • Spotifious
  • Spotify Mini Player
  • Uni-Call. Quickly make all different kinds of phone and FaceTime calls. Very customizable so you can disable all the services you don’t use.
  • NLP currency converter
  • my shortcuts. Hotkeys to launch Finder, Safari, “lr” keyword to launch Lightroom. Modify to suit your own needs.

Geek

NZB

If you know what any of these things are, you will love these workflows:

Updating workflows

You can find more at alfredworkflow.com and Alfred forum, and it’s very easy to make your own.

using Quicksilver to get TinyURL

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If you use Twitter you probably use TinyURL to shorten your URLs pretty often, I looked into doing this with Quicksilver, there are a couple of blog posts that show you how to do it, but none of them I really liked. One even said it was crap himself in the beginning of the post.

What I really want is this:

  • I would copy the URL I want to shorten to my OS X clipboard
  • I run something in Quicksilver
  • The clipboard will be updated with the shortened URL

This turned out to be extremely easy to do. Here’s a Ruby script that does exactly that. If you make the script executable, Quicksilver should include it in its catalog. So just copy a long URL into your clipboard (?-C), invoke Quicksilver, type the filename (I just type “tiny”), and wola, your clipboard will have the TinyURL so you can paste (?-V) it into wherever.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

def shorten(url)
  Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=#{url}")).body
end

IO.popen('pbcopy', 'w').puts "#{shorten(IO.popen('pbpaste', 'r+').read)}"