Hacking productivity with Alfred 🎩

well hello everybody um it is exactly 101 pm uh my time here in california uh this is my first live stream um i have done over 150 one-on-one calls in super pure so this is a little bit weird for me to be speaking to the internet um but uh regardless uh i appreciate that you guys are one uh in the chat and so if there are questions along the way feel free to ping me um of course as i gather between um my presentation and what i'm talking about and what i'm trying to show you that's interesting actually now i think about it um i will be attempting to sort of keep the chat going um and seeing what you guys are talking about but i'm also kind of going to just be like monologuing it and winging it um i'm also going to give people you know three to four minutes um to show up and get situated get started um i'm planning to present for anywhere from let's say 30 to 40 minutes uh i think um oh i have to find my um what's it called uh my agenda that's my agenda so i have a cheat sheet so i know what i'm talking about um now you're really okay great well 10 p.m thank you for staying up for me um yeah brandon this is i mean it's basically you know more or less like youtube live i've never done youtube live before so i'm a sort of a live streaming virgin so go easy on me what's up tim how's it going marcus hey how are you fate i've got a bunch of the the super pure team here as well um i'm really happy to see those folks yeah that's a great question tim if you want to just like moderate for me um feel free to just jump in the chat and say hello and where you're from um i am coming to you from uh oakland california so um it's still it's still pretty nice weather right here it's not quite too cold yet uh rob why can't you see or hear anything cool lots of folks from all over the place india mexico turkey the netherlands chicago love it yeah i know i know i understand i was there for uh there was another live stream this morning by the way um for for those of you who are just joining in super peer is essentially kind of a new platform for live streams uh so far uh they launched in march um i was part of their launch on product hunt and they were really focused on kind of one-on-one interactions um similar to this but of course without like a live audience and just yesterday they announced uh their launch of channels which is live streaming which is what this is and so uh this is my first uh attempt at this so um yes david thank you uh any theme i would say breadth uh is the theme to my bar um i will actually show you a little trick for how i use alfred with my my collection there so let's see good feedback seeming that's good thank you okay let's see one more minute what i'm gonna do let me move this over here sorry i'm like doing some window management and stuff you know kind of figuring things out um also what i'm gonna be doing is gonna be presenting uh keynote in a window and then i'm gonna be using alfred in the alfred window and so this is the first time that i'm going to be streaming my desktop so i don't know how this is going to go um steven interesting um for those of you who are not seeing anything what yeah what browser you guys using um and what operating system that might be helpful for debugging uh i am on big sur so big sur is working um i can see myself in the live stream it seems like some other folks can see me too so that's good uh hopefully you guys can hear me okay as well that was super wide yeah you guys can see my little mic thing here but that's fine hopefully the sound the sound is good huh okay well we're we're about five minutes in um so uh before i um get any going i'm sorry i don't even know what i'm saying uh i'm just gonna get going how about that um okay so let me see i'm gonna share my desktop which is a terrifying thought to do this on the internet but so be it let's see how this goes i'm to move you guys over here i'm actually going to move you over here let's do it that way okay i believe my screen is shared um pull this out a little bit okay let me just get a confirmation that you guys can see my screen for those of you who are here and able to see things yes now okay devroom great thank you thank you for that that boost of attention uh and and uh reassurance um okay so i'm gonna start now i know a lot of folks are gonna want to just dive into like the the nitty-gritty details um of of my productivity hacks for alfred but i promise you i will get there but i always find it very useful and important to understand the history of computing a little bit to understand how we get to where we are um and to put things in the historical perspective in context so um with that this whole talk on hacking productivity with alfred has to go back to the dawn of the computing era with a person who i actually once met his name is doug engelbart and for those of you guys who are not familiar with him this is one of the forefather fathers of uh computing and human computer interaction he worked down at stanford at sri in silicon valley and was instrumental in coming up with so many necessary important ways for people to interact with computers um one of the things that he uh is probably best known for is this document that he prepared called augmenting human intellect which was a conceptual framework and this sort of laid the groundwork for um hci human computer interaction and user experience design as we know it all the way back in the 40s and 50s in fact and what's sort of important to note about this is that a lot of the things that we think are innovative or novel and interesting that we do today and you know see on product all the time or that i hunt all the time actually again got their start way back then this is uh dave evans uh back in the sixties uh nsri he was a contemporary of delgano bart a collaborator and one of the things that's important to note about uh this setup here you can see it's a pretty familiar looking experience right a person on a computer um you know display with a keyboard is that they actually had more advanced technology back then in some ways they had what was called a corded keyboard and so on the left hand side you can sort of see you can imagine that those individual keys are a little bit like um the keys in an organ you know my dad was actually um he played the organ in church and you know i learned a lot about like keyboards and stuff like that and anyways of course you can use these keys as modifiers to change the way that other keys behave you can also see a very early version of the mouse of course which is doug anglebart's invention as well and i just want you to keep these ideas in mind this is how computing was being done in the 60s in a lab in stanford in california and if you look down at your keyboard things really haven't changed all that much so the fundamentals are pretty solid and pretty consistent in fact for some of you your keyboard may look something a little bit like this and so the notion of what we're trying to do is take a an idea or a command or an intention or um some some goal that we have in our minds that we want the computer to do and to try to figure out a way or a sequence of incantations to get the computer to do the thing that we wanted to do right that's that's kind of what you know hci compute human computer interaction is all about it's about thinking about how humans express ideas and how we conceptualize them and then to transform them into a sequence of steps that a computer can do on our behalf and so when we're talking about alfred we are talking about essentially providing a way that's like that corded uh keyboard you know that that modifier to essentially allow us to change the way that the computer behaves by telling it exactly what we wanted to do and so of course the thing that that we've figured out is that if you use a modifier key with another key we can change the behavior of the normal function of that button so in this case we use something like command space to activate these launchers and the launchers have become i would say incredibly popular um in well certainly this year maybe last year as well i'm going to show you something real quick here i actually curate a list of launchers on product hunt you can find this on my profile under my collections and i mean just so far i've got 20 different launchers that i found um you know in the course of you know researching this stuff so they're becoming very popular in a way because software is also becoming more complex and also users are becoming more sophisticated in the things that they want to do we also are moving towards automation and towards increasingly dense software that it doesn't really make sense to go through uh a tree menu to find the things that we wanted to do we want to just tell it especially if these are things that we do over and over again but i want to take you back a little bit further to the origin of at least launching and launchers on the mac pre-spotlight um and that starts with a piece of software called quicksilver uh i'd love to see there's no polls of course um you guys are still doing tech support there bummer um okay david use launching huh um for there's no polls yet on super pure um but you know i'd love to know if any of these apps are our products that you guys have used in the past and um if they're familiar to you quicksilver was one that i fell in love with um and i used uh for quite some time um without really knowing much about the shadowy background behind where it came from it just sort of appeared on the scene and this was probably in the 2005-2006 you know we're talking quite a long time ago and the crazy thing about quicksilver is that quicksilver coincides with my um arrival in silicon valley actually um because back then in the 2005 to 2007 time period of the social web and the early open source web um when i first got to silicon valley i was involved in the launch of firefox and um through that community met a bunch of really interesting people that were building stuff in hacker houses um in kind of the the hills of uh of silicon valley and one of the events that i would go to was this event called super happy dev house or shdh and uh i was the one that did the posters for these events and so this is a poster that i did for let's see this is like the ninth um event and so this was april 29 2006 i think you can find these on my flickr stream um greg awesome to hear that yeah you also got that um and so anyways i went to these events see rappy death house um and i i've been going for quite some time you know whatever and lo and behold one day i was there and either there was a lightning talk or there was something else and i ended up meeting this guy and this is nicholas chikov um and it turned out that nicholas chickoff is the he's the human version of the programmer hacker alcor and alcor was the developer of quicksilver so lo and behold i met this this guy who had built this amazing software for me um and it was sort of like one of those star-studded moments that seems to happen or at least used to happen a lot more in silicon valley where you kind of meet people behind the apps that you're using every day and this mystery was suddenly solved now the reason why i bring this up is because um the philosophy behind quicksilver was to act without doing sort of probably a you know chinese or asian proverb i'm not sure the origin but the idea was to be able to communicate again to the computer in a way that didn't require you to really think or put any effort in you just hit that that keyboard shortcut tell the computer what you wanted to do and it would sort of figure it out or would reveal to you what it could do now here's why this is significant because nicholas jikhoff ended up being essentially aqua hired by google and ended up becoming the lead designer of google so these launchers and this launching paradigm that i'm telling you about actually is the very thing that informed google search right mind blown like i just i just want you to like you know marinate on that for a little bit to understand why this is significant and why it's important the very search engine that is used by billions of people every day was informed by this little app um that was created by this independent developer in silicon valley all the way back in 2005 and six and so so back to quicksilver i've sort of talked at a high level of what it is but here's what it looked like so uh you might remember this ui uh paradigm from back in the day again it was a launcher you you'd activate it and then you'd start typing and you could start typing and search in itunes um you know back before it was called apple music um and you also had what was different in this launcher was essentially like a tuple relationship in other words a relationship of three things so this paradigm also informed some of the work that i did on something called activity streams um where we were modeling an actor or like an object and then uh a verb and then uh you know some indirect object right so in this case you might do a search in a certain context i'm talking about the bottom left here you know searching on google what am i searching for as opposed to let's say looking up an image or looking at something else and then the thing that you're actually searching for so there was a way of kind of setting a context or a domain and then figuring out the verb and then figuring out the thing that you wanted to use for the interaction and that was a little bit of a different paradigm back then um but i think it's useful to sort of understand that that background the other thing that quicksilver had that was really cool uh back the day was a number of different themes or styles i'm going to talk a bit about that uh when it comes to alfred but just note that this is kind of like where this stuff started um you know with different visual styles that at least at the time i thought were super sexy um after uh chickoff was aqua hired by google um quicksilver quickly kind of fell into disrepair and just really wasn't being developed anymore and so i looked for an alternative and ended up finding launchbar and i used launchbar for quite some time it was never quite as fast and kind of didn't work quite as intuitively as quicksilver did for me but nonetheless it was sort of this interregnum where i was using this this product and then eventually ah sorry and and and we've started to see um more of these i guess switchers and commands kind of appear in different contexts so of course slack um which sort of is a productized version of irc added in the switcher with um command k and also i don't know if you know this but if you use command shift k that'll bring up your direct messages so being able to move through software very seamlessly using either keyboard shortcuts or by again executing commands um in some kind of launcher beyond slack of course we've also seen that in uh superhuman and i would say superhuman has done a really good job of popularizing this and getting it out there as one of the core drivers i think of this of the software i want to pull up um this blog post by gabby goldberg let me pull this up i'll pop this in the chat also she wrote this earlier this year in september and i thought it was a really kind of great uh reintroduction of some of the concepts here um you know she she talked about it as the command line come back and it's interesting because this is something i've i've i wrote about quite some time ago um which i called conversational commerce um i'll share this one too sort of two versions of this post but the idea being that increasingly we're going to start talking to our software both verbally as well as um textually and so of course this is a an image from her but the idea was really trying to figure out ways of do i have a good example in here i don't let me let me go to the more recent version of this post showing how we were going to become more conversationally integrated i guess with our software um okay this is taking too long anyways so you sort of get the idea with what's happening with superhuman and so again superhuman has kind of um massively expanded i think the visibility of these types of launchers and now you're seeing them appear in all sorts of different apps okay which brings me to alfred and the core topic of today's conversation so uh first again there's no polls but uh how many of you guys if you just want to say maybe like a plus one in the chat if you are using alfred today um i'd be just great to sort of get a sense for that um i imagine most of you are that's why you're here but um this of course is the general uh preference pane for alfred this is how it starts i use command space um i will show you kind of this is you know i'm pulling up alfred right now um and let me go through this a little bit um one thing that you want to do of course is set alfred to launch at login and then set uh an alfred hotkey i think default it might actually use option space but i use command space awesome great to see those plus ones rolling in um and of course you know alfred provides search so this is sort of an alternative to spotlight um spotlight has gotten quite good over the last several years but it's pretty narrow in terms of what it tries to do and maybe there's a reason for that but let's just say that you know that's one of the competitors um alfred also provides clipboard management now i use something called paste um i love paste paste is a great replacement in fact just an interesting anecdote with big sur paste was broken or at least sync was broken for me and so for literally a week i was unable to use paste and it forced me to use alfred's clipboard and i found it okay like it's it's pretty good what the clipboard buffer allows you to do essentially is to copy multiple things into memory to store them and then retrieve them using search now the reason why that's valuable of course if you sort of imagine your long term and short term memory what a clipboard buffer does is it sort of expands your short-term working memory to almost like an infinite number of things so you know that you copied and pasted your you know girlfriend's address or something like that you know because you're doing gifts for the holidays and but you've already copied and pasted 12 things since then well obviously clipboard buffer allows you to keep those things in memory the other thing that and maybe actually there's a clip for this uh no there's another thing that i'll show you too called snippets and snippets is a way of having a more persistent store that is separate from uh the clipboard management but there's some interesting features that both of those things have the thing that i will get to today is talking about alfred workflows um and i was pretty intimidated honestly by workflows for a long time i found a bunch of them i didn't really know how to make them the interface is a little bit uh opaque i would say you know it's not the most you know especially with things like zapier and other tools that kind of allow you to string together a sequence of um you know commands or you know hook together apis alfred requires you to do a lot more heavy lifting um and maybe in future versions it'll become easier but nonetheless you still have to probably get into the code um in order to make things connect to like web service and things like that nonetheless there are ways of both building workflows that i think um enable even non-developers like myself um to use them effectively and then just kind of like hack things together in order to use workflows and a number of other features and i think actually maybe the next thing um we'll show you this you will need a power pack license and so essentially there's a free version of alfred that allows anybody to try it and use it to get the basics but if you really want to get the value out of it i highly recommend getting the power pack license if you're going to do anything with this tool it just opens up everything and supports the development and it's a very small team of people who are who are supporting and maintaining this so i would invite you to check that out um some of the power pack features just to go over this quickly include uh improved search um i think also sort of an expanded uh repertoire of things that you can search for obviously the clipboard history feature that i just showed you um snippets and auto expanding snippets so in other words you can use sort of a keyword that might expand into like today's date or into your entire address or what i have is um all of my web profiles i have little shortcuts for that i'll kind of i'll show you that you can control music playbook alfredo interesting ah thank you sanan obviously workflow is huge that in and of itself sort of pays for itself it allows you to search your contacts so the apple address book you can run shell and terminal commands which i actually use quite a bit um custom themes which will show you like i mean it's just like it's crazy that um some of this stuff is not well of course it should be included by default but that's because you have to pay for it um the integration of one password which is pretty great and of course syncing and backing up your settings now i use dropbox as the place where i sync and backup my settings and so that means that if i have alfred on running on multiple computers you can actually have all the same settings and all the same workflows synced across them that's incredibly useful um obviously like where you can find and get alfred if you don't have it i imagine you probably do is at alfredapp.com there's a bunch of great resources techniques um how to's there i use that as a pretty solid resource to get started um now i'm gonna start showing you some stuff so now that you've had like the long preamble let me get into it um let's see so pull this over here so we have alfred here um oh i'm gonna let me let me pull over a browser window okay so um oh yeah i'll show you guys this later but it doesn't matter um so obviously like one of the first things that you can do is just you know search for you know you can google stuff um i think i use g search yeah so like anything like so you set up a fallback search let me see how that works i think it's under uh here default results [Music] set up fallback results yeah so sorry let me let me walk you through this one of the things you'll notice is i'm uh trying to figure this all out as i go so you'll sort of watch me in figuring out how to use alfred because i kind of forget but it's kind of intuitive once you get it um what i want to show you is essentially if you do a search for something and you don't have a workflow or you don't have a custom search or something like that where like what does it show as a fallback um in case nothing is found and so if you go under features and then default results you go to you go to fault so only show fallbacks when there are no results or you can show it you know intelligently then you can set up fallback so if like it doesn't know what it's going to do you can just add some stuff here uh anyways but the way that this would work is like let's say if i just you know search for devrum and sare what you can see is like the fallback is to search google for devrum idevrum um and so that'll obviously just pull up that search you know very simple very straightforward um you do file search so across all of your things i don't really use it too often because i just have far too many files i'm not going to bother to get into that i interesting what is this you know i'm not going to talk about this one because i don't know anything about that one either you can pull in your web bookmarks your clipboard history um define a dictionary is cool so you can do like define um obviously i have a custom search here defined word and then i might say i don't know uh just chuck thumper a word i don't know if that's word of comfort how comfortable guys i guess it's a word yeah that pulled up the dictionary so again it's just a way of navigating does it even work i don't know let's let's ignore that for now um i feel like it's in a song or something anyways um it's a way again of navigating into different apps and stuff like that um one of the things that i use let's see it's a good example i just kind of want to get into like all the stuff that i use this for though um maybe i'll show you okay i'm going to start with themes um because i think the themes are pretty interesting one of things that i've done and thank you by the way martin for mentioning my dropbox paper theme that's what this is right here um what i would recommend that you do if you really want to get into it is you can actually use custom fonts for your themes and so that means that they end up looking really nice um i created variants of my dropbox theme actually let me pull up my themes here and i'll send you guys a link okay so this is where you can get my dropbox paper theme um there are two variants one is the natto version which has a free google font and then the other one uses the atlas font i won't tell you how to extract it from the dropbox ios binary but that might be a place to look if you wanted to get that font i don't of course condone uh piracy of any sort but that would be one way to get that and then of course you can also change the configuration of the window to show and hide different elements by default but i'll just kind of show you what some of these themes look like so this is um the atlas version so using the atlas font this is the the natto version so you can see it's a little bit of a lighter theme there there is there's a bunch of themes that alfred comes with by default i find them to be actually very hideous i mean no offense alpha team but it's just kind of like not that attractive um i also thank you martin yes you you got the reference right there actually that's okay let's try this so uh i i built this hay theme which is like super chunky but let's do genius so i have a custom search for genius and let's do tug thump or maybe we'll find something there all right so so genius of course is a place to find lyrics to a song um and so what i just did was i executed a search using alfred um to find of course chumbowmba's 1997 hit we are dating ourselves um but there you go that's that's how we get to this very quickly i do wonder what it means is the eighth it's from new labor okay anyways okay back to um affects what i was doing oh i made a really cool one uh oh right so i made a superhuman theme um you know attempting to try to you know emulate what i saw in superhuman um using a lot of the same colors and designs and styles one of the tips that i'm going to move past this oh i haven't oh yeah i'm working on a twitter one too oh synthwave synthwave is actually pretty cool um unfortunately you can't do glows so that that's why that doesn't have that one but i'm gonna go back to the dropbox atlas one here's here's a little like secret pro tip it turns out that if um that you can actually set different themes in alfred for light and dark and i didn't know this but if you set the light theme um when you have the light uh view enabled or whatever the light theme activated in your in mac os and then you switch in alfred like let's say you switch your os theme to dark and then you switch the alfred theme to dark it'll actually reflect that setting so it's really hidden it's hard to find but if you just if you don't want to have the light version of the theme always visible then you can change it to something else um when it's it's dark okay so that's that's themes oh and i guess one thing that i will say about this is it's very easy to create these themes um you really just like i don't want to this one up um you just kind of like oh that one's a default uh here's a sample okay so you can just click and you can um right click i think you right click yes it's gonna beach ball wonderful because i have too many fonts that's the problem um and you can basically change uh the fonts here so this is how you do this it's also possible to i guess i'll show you this too let's see what this cobalt looks like thanks for that suggestion um i'm going to pop this open so you can export this as a file uh i'm just going to put this in to desktop okay let's get rid of this oh and then okay oh god it's hideous all right so let's go back here so one of the things that you can do to uh search your files is to use the tilde so the tilde represents your own directory so if i do tilde then that's going to pull up my home directory and now i can go to desktop and then i can start typing and now i'm basically where i thought i would be and if i hold down let's see i think it's if i hold down command and i hit enter it should open what just happened okay it did it'll um it'll actually open that file in finder and then what i want to show you is oh okay check this out i i know you could probably do all these things different ways but part of the the idea here is to show how you can sort of hack alfred to do things for you and this is by the way this is very much like a [Music] a buffet a buffet of things that i'm showing you one of the things that i did was i created a lot of these toolkits and one of the ones that i created was something called uh well actually this is somebody else's but um you can open files with a certain editor right and so what i want to do is i want to show you the text in that file that i just created and so i've created a hotkey in this workflow and so what i'm going to do is going to press that workflow or that that hotkey to open this file in atom and so that's command option control a and so what should happen is adam should launch let me see if it's launching okay it's launching and so now i've basically pulled that file into atom with a hotkey with a shortcut because what it's doing i'll show you real quick here oh unfortunately this is going to be a little a little code it's pulling the oh i'm sorry it's pulling the selection right so whatever i have selected in the operating system in this case in finder and it's passing that file to adam which then is opening it up in here now the reason why i wanted to show this to you is because you can see that the alfred appearance file which is the theme is really almost like it's just a json file with a bunch of different colors and fonts and so on and so when i was creating my alfred let's see dropbox slight theme all i was doing i'm sorry if you can't see this um with setting the font to a font that i preferred uh in my theme so that's one way to get a lot of control over your themes when you're designing them okay um before i get deeper into that i want to go back to the presentation real quick just to finish off a couple other thoughts and ideas i mean if you guys do have questions feel free to put them in the chat um i know i'm all over the place but welcome to my my mind um again like what's important i think for me to to communicate is is how working with alfred is really about both a state of mind and a set of expectations and learning how to keep your hands like on the keyboard so that's very important uh i i watch a lot of people who are more like novices um with computers and there's a lot of hunting and pecking and pointing and touching and it's kind of tedious right so one way to think about it is like you know the touchpad is lava and you just kind of want to like keep your hands on the keyboard and move very quickly through all the commands that you're doing um so that's one place to start um the other thing that i've learned in working with alfred effectively is to pave my own cow paths what does that mean well the idea of paving a cow path basically is to look at where there's existing behavior you know for so so i'll give you a real example uh i went to carnegie mellon in pittsburgh and uh there was this kind of what was called the cut this this green grassy area in the middle of the university you know the students would of course go and hang out and sit on and have lunch there were walkways of course along the side of this beautiful grassy area and there was one uh kind of perpendicular walkway across the center of it you know where people walked right diagonally across the grass and so there was of course this big brown you know piece of dirt you know where everyone walked to get to class so it would make more sense in that case to pave the student path in that case because that's where people actually walk as opposed to where you aspirationally help people walk and so from a similar perspective what i've learned to do is to observe my own behavior what sites am i visiting a lot what searches am i doing a lot is there a project that i'm working a lot working on frequently where if i automate some of that or i kind of observe what i'm doing and i build a little workflow for that i'll become a lot more efficient and i'll show you what that means in a second the other thing to do is to really kind of be fearless with alfred um it's it's fairly forgiving so it's hard to screw up um i find that if you do the simplest thing first then you can build more complex workflows over time and with a lot of the toolkits that i built i started out very simple with one or two things that i wanted to do and then either i'll reach out to a developer and convince them to help me out and to build some sort of uh support for something and i'll show you what i mean by that in a second or you just find like a simple way to kind of add maybe five or ten percent uh efficiency uh which compounds over time um and so whoops what happened and so oh right whoops so anyways that's that's kind of where my web search hacks um came from and i'll show you also my snippets and auto expansion now so let me and i apologize i'm going fast i do i think i'll i'll share this recording with you guys afterwards so you can refer to it um i'm probably going to put a course together on this as well because i realize like when i'm very scattered into like i'm probably going a mile a minute you're like what is going on i don't even understand but hence the um the challenge of this uh medium currently in any case let me show you uh my web search hacks because i think this is something i'm both pretty proud of and it's also a little bit like you are mental dude like what is wrong with you so one of the things that i seem to do a lot is i do a lot of web searching i search for a lot of stuff um and going back to i think it was martin that might have mentioned the bar um what are you saying actually oh yeah if dropbox will only add new features to paper yeah i hear you on that um so let me just show you the these are i know it's it's absurd but these are all the different custom web searches that i've built um and i've also created a site that lists all of these so that you guys can use them yeah i mean deborah by all means take all of the screen touch a like so what i've done is i basically made these links available to you because every website has slightly different urls i use a form of what i call uh url hacking in order to figure out what web searches are and then i basically dump them right into alfred and then i also publish them um i have an air table i'll show you kind of like what that looks like on the back end um so that you guys can benefit from from from them um and then i've also taken to making all these custom icons because i i'm so anal about how things look and so anyways this is my uh so where are we at now we've got uh oh we're at 200 oh we did it we crossed the 200 mark threshold okay so we've got over 200 custom web searches um which again i think is totally ridiculous i've even gotten a few uh user submissions and so if you guys have uh custom web searches that you think i should add by all means there is a form up here suggest a custom search that you can offer um that would be great i'd love to take a look at that but essentially what this allows me to do is i i use an app called bar notes it hasn't been updated in a while i would love to have someone help me out in improving it but essentially if i want to make a cocktail um i would ask you does anybody have a preference for what they want to make a cocktail with i'll just say gin let's go with jen for now um i can do i'm going to search so i search bar and so what you can see is um obviously like all the apps come up but then also search bar notes so i'm going to search bar notes for gin what that allows me to do is essentially oh that's very embarrassing um they need to clearly fix their cert i told you i need some help um anyways i trust these guys so anyways you can see what what what i've been able to do is essentially execute that search without having to go to barnouts.com first and then find the search box instead i just use alfred so again keep my hands on the keyboard i move very quickly through it if i want to make a bourbon drink you know same thing right that's kind of how that works um the other way in which i use this is um finding like icons oh this is a really good one so essentially what a custom web search allows you to do is to put arbitrary text at the end of the url okay so that's why it's uh why i talk about this as url hacking um the reason is because there's a site called um brand is called brand uh brand fetch okay brand fix is really cool brand fetch essentially tries to assemble it's almost like a wiki commons um of brand assets you know svgs which are incredibly useful for doing design work and so if you go to brand like they have a plugin for sketch if you want that but on brand fetch it says enter a brand name or type url well for the most part i know that um i know the brand that i'm looking for and i know the url right so if i want to get the brand and i'm working in sketch for let's say instagram i can do brand i hit enter and i type instagram.com and it just takes that text and it appends it to the url here i don't know if you can see this and so very quickly i'm able to get to this page as opposed to just typing it like and remembering what the specific incantation is um for uh for this search in a similar way i can do that with icons so i have a ton of different searches for icons so i can search the icon project for um where'd it go okay uh let's say martini uh this is just the theme today ah fernando great question so how am i opening air table in its own window well okay this is this is not a um it's not an alpha tip but this is a chrome tip um if i wanted to let's say let's say unsplash so i go to unsplash search on splash for let's say martini pull this off into its own little window here okay great right you know what you know what unsplash is i'm gonna go to the the unsplash home page now from here you use the uh menu and you go down to more tools you say create shortcut i had no idea what this was but if you say create shortcut you can say unsplash and then open as a window create and what this does is creates its own separate application in under chrome apps as its own separate docked application so you can basically make your own kind of site-specific browsers using that that little hack and i find it very useful okay um so let's see so we just went through a bunch of custom web searches i think let's see did i go through um okay yeah so so i'll sort of explain how um i think about this also um let me find a good one um okay linkedin so this is probably the the the threshold point when i go from creating just custom web searches to building a toolkit so linkedin actually does allow you to search even though it seems very uh obtuse um if you if you are signed in if you're signed into the browser so if i say in so in is the keyword that i set for linkedin and hit space you can see that i have a bunch of linkedin searches here so i can search for people i can search just a general search i can search for messages search linkedin companies let's say i'll search for linkedin companies for super peers again this just auto completes adds the text to the url and um should pull up obviously the company great oh i should be following them okay great so now i'm following super peer right now the problem with that is that i have it looks like i have six individual custom web searches and there's nothing wrong with this they'll work fine but i want to show you how i use my twitter toolkit um so actually let me close this who knows what's going on there um okay let me pull up i'll send you a link to it so if you guys want to like follow along this i got to tell you this this workflow uh i feel like i'm a little bit mental for creating it but i use twitter so much um this is how i i tweet the way i do um let me pull this up here okay so this is my twitter toolkit i'm gonna make this full screen actually i don't know if you guys are gonna be able to see that still i'll just make it i'll just maximize the window okay all right so get a sense for what is in this toolkit okay now i went crazy uh basically yes joseph i will um i will share that um navish the uh the air table itself is not um shared but i will share the link to the listing okay now why is it so complex well this is so complex for a number of reasons the number one reason is because i support um using the native twitter mac app which is a catalyst app i support searching within uh the web and then i also support tweetbot now tweetbot doesn't support all the same uh url um schemes as the twitter app does um and so it's not a one-to-one uh ratio but what what basically i'm doing is essentially i'll show you so if i want to let's say search for new app icons okay so i uh i use obviously the hashtag and i say okay new app icon now i've done a couple things so one you'll see that like uh the pound symbol is obviously used for hex colors and so that's why you can see down below there's a bunch of different colors um but i have these two um searches keywords for searching on twitter and so what i'm gonna do is gonna search twitter actually i'm gonna show you some okay i'll start here search twitter for hashtag new app icon why did i pull up over here oh that's not what i want to do okay so obviously you can see one thing happened there i'm sure you guys are still here okay cool uh martin i will show you how i have achieved something along those lines um great so what i have here is essentially a search across all of twitter for this hashtag which of course i use um another another thing that i've done is i've added the keyword my my being sort of like the contextual space for my content so if i use the keyword my and i do space now i can search my tweet for a hashtag search for my recent tweets so for example if i want to find the tweet where i was mentioning alfred well here's how i would do that i would say search for my recent tweets that include alfred app why does it keep doing that okay some windowing issues here okay and so you can see that it's pulled up my most recent tweets in which i mentioned alfred app right now what if i wanted to let's see what would be another good one i want to find all the tweets where i'm talking about people who want my instagram username well i can search my tweets for uh ig chris uh and so this is for hashtag igt chris now of course if you don't use twitter as much as i do then this is not going to be that useful but what i'm trying to demonstrate is how you can sort of observe your own behavior and then create a toolkit or workflow that meets your own needs one of the other things that i have here is i use uh the exclamation symbol to be able to view my notifications across different services right so i can go quickly to my super peer notifications facebook notifications etc um one of the other things martin you asked about um tweeting i also have created something called the new cloud documents uh workflow which i i might just simplify to like new but now i say new and then i can tweet with text uh this might be broken um because i think i need to type the text just say hi martin and so now basically it's using twitter's intents to execute a new uh pre-composed tweet with my text in it so i think you know twitter shut that api down because they hate developers but regardless now you can use it for that um so that's that's one of the things that i've done there um and you can kind of like browse around to get a sense of what else is here um one of the other toolkits that i'm building is a tool for finding my own uh web profiles i haven't i haven't released this one yet but um it's called find me online and um what i'm using here is a list filter and i'll show you what a list filter does in a second but if i say me now basically um see all my different profiles across different places so if i want to go to my let's say my stub sub stack profile boom just like that and the other thing that's cool i think is if i press the option key i can copy that url to the clipboard so someone's like hey what's your medium profile am i cool i just pull it me i hit option and then i hit enter and now if i paste this in now it's going to go to my medium profile so it's a really fast okay that's apparently not my profile maybe it's an ad great so now i'll show you how i fixed that so i will go in here now one of the things that i've done um and this is getting a little bit technical uh i suppose but workflows allow you to set variables and so a variable for me is my username right so when i release this workflow anybody can put whatever username they usually have across different social media platforms and that'll set the default and then of course if you have a different username and different profiles you can change it to customize it to that link but the idea is that if you know your username you know it was bob schmo you could put bob schmoe in there and now um by using variables when i go into this list filter you can see that it's an argument i know this is like it's a little bit confusing because it's like programmer ease but i'm using a variable to just pull in my username and to append it again to the link where my profile is and so the problem with medium is that it doesn't take just the username it actually needs an app in front of it and so now if i just add the at and i hit save now when i view me and i'm also one one trick you can see down you're not going to see it here but like on the right hand side there are these like command and the numbers again if you want to keep your your hands on the keyboard i'm just going to use command 5 and that's going to open my medium profile um very quickly without having to like press the space bar or get down to anything else um let me see what else i can show you real quick here um let me see oh crap there's a whole like snippets thing let me show you snippets real quick because snippets are like really badass so i've showed you how to like navigate the web i've showed you a bunch of like ways of getting your custom web searches to work for you um snippets are very interesting um let me see uh someone here uh yeah okay fine i'll just do this um so with snippets one of the things that you can do is you can use a prefix to kind of scope a set of i guess auto expansions by that what i mean is that when i type in this case two periods and then a keyword it'll expand into something bigger and so let me show you what that means um in in sketch i use bounding box as a layer name a lot so what i did was i just set period period bb and that replaces the text uh with with bounding box i can also do the same thing um i use two right open arrows for my my profiles so if i say this this and then super that changes um into my my super pure link and then if i do the same thing with tw that's twitter do the same thing with facebook right so it just becomes really easy to expand uh from uh these snippets into other things yes that is uh fate that's a really good one there's a bunch of really good ones out there i mean if you guys have other resources that you want to share by all means post them in the chat um i'm gonna wrap up real soon there's so much more that i could show you and tell you about but um you know i want to respect your time as well um okay so i showed you the snippets and auto expansion um and then i i think this is sort of like the story of that twitter toolkit you know i built something that i needed for myself and then i tried to figure out how i can make it useful for more people and then i just put it up on github and shared it um oh the one that i'll show you that you guys haven't seen and that devram hasn't seen and the team hasn't seen is uh that i'm building one and again i'd love to have the team help me out with this for super pair so this is a super pure tool kit and what i'm basically doing is i'm using a list filter so these are again these are different objects that the workflow exposes um but i'm also mixing and matching just like urls and so um like when i say me uh that's actually if i i mean there's a lot of them in here maybe if i type me super nope that doesn't work okay and you can see here view my super beer profile is coming from here so you can see me i have the text oh and so this is another thing that i'm doing for these toolkits because i'm making so many of them i'm actually using a variable to store the service name so that way i don't have to change the text in all these because i keep adding um features in all my workflows that are pretty consistent if i wanted to let's say okay here's what i'm going to do is i'm going to say super and then i hit enter and so now this is coming from that list filter i'll show you what this looks like okay i hope so uh where is oh this is the list filter okay so see what's happening here i'm using a keyboard super pure the argument is optional and then essentially i'm just listing all the different places and features that i want to expose so these are all uh you know pretty consistent so one of the things that i want to do i'll show you this here uh okay i'm getting a little head order but regardless anyway so alfred forum is a really good resource has a bunch of work um workflows i don't find it to be like that reliable it's really not being maintained anymore but it is a sort of canonical place of finding stuff you can do a search on github um for stuff and of course i've shared um my resources which include workflows and themes um and we could have a discussion but we're kind of out of time but i do want to sort of end on one thing and i want to make this all tied together for you one thank you for for showing up for my first live stream i'll get better at this over time i'll probably slow down and try to do fewer things um but i do want to leave you guys if you guys want to talk to me about this stuff um i want to give you a discount on on a call with me and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you let's see where'd it go uh maybe i screwed this up here okay so see if i can make this happen live super okay so i'm going to create a discount code cool what did i say was hack alfred what do you think 20 20 25 off hack alfred discount code uh we'll do sure you guys 25 percent not 125 like a bug 24 to all i'm gonna say to uh this to a product call and to an hour-long consult and let's say this is good until the end of the month okay super i can't show you the rest of my discount codes but uh you guys can use hack alfred for this um any seo related i mean uh let me show you something so if i were to do i think it's wf is a workflow uh search like a workflow for searching workflow if i do workflow seo i think what will happen is it'll actually search okay so there's an seo checker right there um i don't know what this is i'll pull it up and see oh crazy so it actually just downloaded the workflow um let me let me show you what workflow that is so it's this one right here okay so there's a website called alfredworkflow.com and that's where you can find some seo related ones let's see uh here's the github repo for that one nice cool yeah so that's that's one way to sort of get some stuff out of this uh and again like i'll show you um yeah the alfred forum uh has a place where you can go and you can do a search like if i do actually for search so if i search here for seo maybe that'll pull up some stuff martin i appreciate that um martin i don't know if you know uh oh okay that's interesting oh that's the website search if you search on the forum maybe you'll find something um but there is uh there's the native paper dropbox app and they are doing a few things in there but it's not you know i agree with you it's kind of feels a little slow um okay cool so here's a bunch of seo stuff in the forum i'll just share this link with you guys uh for cloud search well again if i do this when i say cloud search um nothing there maybe it's under forum and i need to have a search for the alfred forum okay so let's go add this and then this will be the last thing that i do don't think yes there's no open search here so we just put the query just like that um search alfred forum for barry and then we'll say alfred and then there's my icons all the icons that i made okay cool now we can search the alfred forum for cloud search nothing so far yep you got it guys okay well um if you have any i can stay around for a couple more minutes if you guys have other questions um but uh you know i could keep going on this for all day and i just don't know how much of this is is useful um but you know by all means i i really appreciate you guys showing up for this uh my first little web stream here hopefully it was somewhat informative and useful actually let me see if i have a link for feedback um yeah okay i'll send you guys this link to uh my feedback form if you guys do want to leave any feedback or get in touch with me you probably know where to find me how to find me you got me in chat here um but anyways really appreciate it and um i will i'll get your your emails and i'll send you guys a link to the recording as well um so you guys have it and maybe i'll do this again sometime appreciate it thanks everybody

Channel: Chris Messina

Views: 1,872

Keywords: alfred, productivity, mac app, mac, alfred app

Id: QlN2AEh7wjI

Length: 59min 46sec (3586 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021