/ productivity

My Alfred Setup

Often, when I talk with people about macOS productivity tools, I always mention Alfred.

Then I always get a question like: "What do you use Alfred for, other than opening apps."

Then I have to think about it. Since working with Alfred is a habit of mine. That is the reason I decided to summarize my the way I use Alfred here so that I can reference it here.

Here are some of the ways I use Alfred.

Probably my best combo is Alfred with Dash. Dash is offline documentation viewer. There is a build in workflow, which allows you to query documentations directly from Alfred with Dash.

Alfred Dash Integration

This is one of the reasons; I can be quite productive without the Internet.

Second, since most of the communication, I do is in English (which is a foreign language for me). I often need to translate back and forth. Alfred has a build Dictionary. Which is great, but what I mostly use is this Google Translate workflow.

Urban Dictionary is also quite useful (especially when communicating with Americans).

For more complicated translations, I use the build in tr Web search.

When we are on the subject. Those are the custom Web searches, I use:

  • gem: http://rubygems.org/search?query={query}
  • github: https://github.com/{query}
  • hex: http://hex.pm/packages?search={query}&sort=downloads
  • npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/{query}
  • unsplash: https://unsplash.com/search/photos/{query}

Those are quite useful, especially when checking for npm packages.

Recently, I'm starting to use the Bookmark features.

I have bookmarks like: PRs for Review, Periscope Dashboard for Quarter, Teams Quip Folder, Teams Trello Board, Jenkins, Facebook Messanger and so.

I also use a lot of converters like:

Another nifty small workflow is Timer. I don't use Pomodoro for a long time. But still, like to time box experiments and spikes.

While drafting this post, I noticed that I use a lot of System Commands like sleep.

I use other workflows, but I think those are the major ones for me.

I often browse Packal for more new workflows.

Overall when I see something, which I'm doing a couple of times, I put it into a file then at some I check how I can automate it.