I’ve blogged about Alfred once before, it’s a great little launcher - the fact that it uses Spotlight comments to tag/exclude/group apps and files for launching is IMHO it’s killer feature - being able to group all your tools AND files/documents together makes Alfred a awesome workflow tool, but I’m not here to talk about work, well not exactly - take a look at the pic at the top of this post - 6 small apps (whose code I gleaned from here), each app controls playback and volume of my Jukebox G4 Laptop, all linked together with the spotlight keyword ‘JUKE’ those combined with GROWL makes for a really powerful combination, I can control every aspect of playback of the jukebox - and get feedback as to what’s currently playing without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. I wasn’t able to find that exact Functionality anywhere else, and because I run Alfred and Growl anyway there’s ZERO OVERHEAD.
This only really scratches the surface of what’s doable, so stayed tuned. At some point in the future I’m sure Alfred will allow us to pass arguments to scripts (ala Launchbar) at that point I’ll write scripts that Spotlight tags selected files into Alfred groups, and the universe will recursively collapse upon itself.
(Icons by David Lanham)
I recently started to explore other mac media players, iTunes has awesome functionality, but sadly it’s a pig memorywise, so my day to day music listening software has become VOX whose small footprint and clean UI hits all the right notes for me. I needed a simple way to create m3u playlist files (which are really just filelists saved with a ‘m3u’ file extension - every solution I could fine seemed overkill, most of the Automator workflows I found were predicated on you already having a iTunes playlist you wanted to export - I wanted just a clean ‘right/control click on folder full of music - ‘save as playlist’ kind of functionality.
Attached is such a workflow. I’ve used it successfully recursively on a folders containing 10,000 songs, and (although Automator takes a few seconds to actually startup) the action it self is pretty fast.
A few notes:
- It attempts to filters out the kind of CRUFT (.txt,.jpg,.png,.nfo) that you might have in a folder if you <cough>[acquire]</cough> music via some type of distribution network.
- It asks you what you want to name it, but by default it’s going to save it to your desktop.
- it includes subfolders as playlist items, VOX ignores these so I didn’t bother to exclude them - I suppose other players might actually choke on them so YMMV.
- The attached file is the full-fat editable automator workflow - you’ll probably want to save that as a finder plugin
I haven’t had any issues with it, let me know if you find it helpful.
DOWNLOAD: Create_M3U_Playlist.workflow
Recently I switched my launcher of choice to ‘Alfred’ a nifty indie project that I became aware of via Twitter, in the past I’ve been both a Quicksilver and LaunchBar user - both extremely powerful apps that although I used them religiously, each had quirks I never could really get past (QS had stability issues, LB was stable but I never wrapped my head around it’s particular method of bringing back results, and it wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants)
Alfred is in beta, but seems stable, visually pretty, and actively developed (which I really appreciate) - And has most of the features you’d want in a launcher - but I want to talk about a single feature, that I really like, Alfred’s use of spotlight comments allows you to create groups of essentially unrelated apps, it’s so simple, so obvious (and honestly it may have worked with LaunchBar too, but I never checked) just add your desired key work to all the apps you want in a group and BOOM! done - I add ‘webd’ to Transmit, Coda, Textmate, Cssedit and Espresso and evoke Alfred and it just works, you can assign as many keywords to an app as you want, for example I add ‘ftp’ to transmit as well.
It’s a simple feature I really appreciate, and we all know how hard simple actually is. So if you’re in the market for a nifty, pretty, deceptively powerful launcher that’s only going to get better - take a look at Alfred.
If you’ve been here before you may notice the site looks noticeably different - what was once dark red, now white, the visual challenge of reading blue off red is gone - in it’s place; miles and miles of white - don’t get used to it - as I get more and more familiar with butchering, torturing and spindling WordPress (I’m a hardcore EE guy usually) - it’s libel to get very strange up in this bitch. Until them… enjoy the white :)
Just a glamour photo of Maxx!, He’s a excellent Cat, handsome, loyal and a great player of ‘fetch’…
I make no claim of being a good photographer, I think 25 years as a designer has provided me a decent eye for composition and color, I’m also really practiced at photographing cats, any magic in these shots has to be attributed to the cats - I was just fortunate enough to get the camera focussed, and to press the shutter - it’s as simple as that - Both shot with a 50mm prime lens, which the more I use, the more I love.
Always fun when a client unexpectedly sends me cool stuff - this super8 Kodak Instamatic M22 will fit perfectly in my camera collection (mostly pre-1975 consumer movie cameras) The fact that this one comes with box/instructions and unexposed film is just a bonus. Thanks Barney!
I’ve written more of these posts than any one person should ever have too - but this one is perhaps the hardest, I had been kidding myself that my terminally ill cat ROO would beat the odds, and somehow recover from mouth cancer - when we had taken him to the oncologist he had been given two to four months, and being the amazingly stoic boy he was, he made it four months without even a whimper, I thought (irrationally so) that if he could make it past the four months the oncologist was wrong - and maybe she was wrong about everything, and that ROO could make a full recovery - denial is a powerful thing.
On the morning of the 25th my palace of denial came crashing down, ROO wanted to eat, but simply physically couldn’t, ‘T’ and I both knew it was time. I somehow managed to keep it together (barely) and we helped ROO cross the Rainbow Bridge.
I love all my cats equally, but ROO touched our hearts in such a way that his absence in our house is painful - I keep expecting to see him walk in the room - tail held high. We love you big guy, we’re honored to have been your forever family..
