Showing 6 posts tagged Alfred

Adding files to OmniFocus with Alfred

Adding files to OmniFocus with Alfred Another fine piece of OmniFocus extension work by Don Southard allowing you to add the current selected file from Finder to your favourite productivity application via your favourite application launcher Alfred. Check out Don’s blog for more helpful Alfred extensions and OmniFocus hacks.

I am a big Alfred fan and it has replaced LaunchBar for me. Although I am using it for quite a while now, the above free ScreenCastsOnline video tutorial by Don McAllister also taught me a thing or two about Alfred’s PowerPack features.

Search and open OmniFocus Projects enhanced with Alfred support

One of the things I always come across when using OmniFocus is the need to quickly find and open/focus a particular project. While OmniFocus has it’s own search capabilities and of course allows you to navigate to and focus a specific project. However, this typically doesn’t cut it for me since it involves multiple steps and, depending of the perspective setting you are currently in, may not provide the intended result.

AppleScript to the rescue

Thankfully there is a great AppleScript based solution to this problem and I have covered it before in my Top 5 OmniFocus Applescripts post. The original script by Rob Trew can be launched via Launchbar by passing the search string on or from the OmniFocus toolbar asking you for the search string.

Adding in Alfred support

The script itself is basically perfect, like everything that Rob does, but I was missing support for Alfred and so I added it. You can now invoke the script from Alfred as an AppleScript extension (Powerpack required), using for example the keyword ‘ofind’ and add the search string in Alfred itself. If more than one project contains the search string you are presented with a dialog to select the project you have been looking for and a new OmniFocus window will be opened with the desired project in focus. Should you decide to build your own Alfred extension from the script and not use the one below, please note that you need to remove the ‘on run’ block to make it work with Alfred.

Download the script of Alfred extension

You can download the script as an AppleScript file for use with Launchbar, in the OmniFocus toolbar or with script launchers such as FastScripts. If you like to build your own Alfred extensions you can start from this file as well. For the more lazy I have also have the ready made Alfred extension available for download.

He did it again! Don Southard, aka @BinaryGhost, who writes the DirtDon techblog is becoming my favorite developer of OmniFocus integrations/extensions. After he offered a very light-weight integration between my favorite application launcher Alfred and OmniFocus, he has now gone all the way and utilised Alfred’s latest feature to interact with shell scripts. The official Alfred update was just released as Don published hisOmniFocusCLI solution.

You can invoke the OmniFocusCLI shell script from within Alfred and even use some level of natural language parsing for dates and contexts when entering your task straight into OmniFocus. Compared to the light-weight integration you don’t need to go via the OmniFocus Quick Entry window anymore as well.

Lots of respect for this piece of work! If you are a Alfred and OmniFocus user this is a must have.

Use Alfred to add tasks to OmniFocus

It’s always great if two of your favorite applications go out and have a drink together. These two needed a little help and @binaryghost showed them how to date in his post about “Use Alfred to add tasks to OmniFocus”. Creating a customer search in Alfred makes it possible to trigger OmniFocus through it’s URI scheme.

I don’t like the fact that the added tasks doesn’t go straight to the inbox but instead pops-up in OmniFocus Quick Entry. Hence this may only be helpful for those of you that have difficulties to remember keyboard short-cuts or simply ran out of memorable ones because you have all these apps that like to have global short-cuts. And boy, I can see cases for both from own experience.

Alfred and Notational Velocity

Finding and/or creating notes in Notional Velocity using Alfred

There have already been some nice hacks with Alfred.app’s Custom Search feature, such as entering tasks into OmniFocus. With the URI handler introduced in the recent Notational Velocity 3.0 version you can now also do similar things with your notes.

You can create a custom search in Alfred using the Notational Velocity URI handler nv://URI-escaped-title. All you need to do is add replace URI-escape-title with Alfred’s {query} parameter. It then reads nv://{query}.

Now add the display text keyword of your choice and save the new custom search.

When now using this custom search in Alfred Notational Velocity will search for notes containing the string. You can either select the desired note from NV’s result list or, if no note with the exact title is found, simply create it by hitting return in NV’s search/title field.