Alfred Omnifocus

Fortunately, the Alfred workflow “Search OmniFocus” provides a solution. Once you download and install it by double-clicking or dragging the file into Alfred, you can search within OmniFocus.
If you are using OmniFocus as your task manager, this workflow will allow you to search for tasks, projects, context, flagged tasks, active tasks, and more. You can even list all your projects and context right in the Alfred window. I use this workflow multiple times a day to quickly launch my active task list.

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 its own search capabilities and of course allows you to navigate to and focus a specific project. Alfred OmniFocus 2 AirMail Firefox 1password Teleport Coda2 Copy Dropbox Fantastical Pages Numbers Keynote Typinator Evernote TextWrangler PDF Pen 6. Older apps that didn’t make the cut include: Acrobat Pro Desktop Blurrifier Bartender Bjango utilities ColorSnapper Chrome Opera ColorPicker SleepTime DragonDrop Divvy Hazel Wunderlist Tweetbot.

Since the v2 release, we’ve updated our blog to a simpler, cleaner look. We are also planning on making much better use of it with interviews, feature guides and much more over the coming months – so keep an eye on it for fun Alfred features. 🙂

Over the past few months, the Alfred community (that’s you!) have created some truly brilliant workflows. We’ve highlighted a few of our favourites before, but here are some more gems we’ve dug up for you.

Workflows are a Powerpack feature, so if you’re not yet a Powerpack user, you can either upgrade your v1 license or buy a new license.

Weather

David Ferguson (jdfwarrior) has been working tirelessly to help users with their own workflows on the forum, but has also created a great Weather workflow which shows you conditions and forecast.

If you’re wondering if it’s BBQ and ice cream weather, check out the Weather workflow.

Spotify Workflows

If you listen to Spotify all day, as we do, you’ll love these Spotify workflows.

The original Spotify workflow was created by Jeff Johns (phpfunk) and allows you to control Spotify with a thorough range of keywords. Have a look at the basic commands and download the workflow to get some summer tunes going!

For a different twist on the same theme, Spotifious by Ben Stolovitz also allows you to control Spotify, launching from a hotkey. Find out more and download Spotifious on the forum.

OmniFocus Workflow

Need to be more efficient with your work tasks? If you’re an OmniFocus fiend, you’ll be able to manage your tasks from Alfred. Surely that means you can leave early and go grab a beer?

Firefox & Chrome Bookmarks Search

This isn’t a workflow, but a very useful integration worth sharing.

Out of the box, Alfred searches Safari bookmarks, as Chrome and Firefox don’t support Spotlight search by default. However, we really like Brow by Tim Schroeder as an alternative way to get native integration for bookmarks search in these two browsers.

Once you’ve installed Brow, Tim provides a guide to adding your Brow bookmarks to Alfred, so that in a few seconds, you can search your Chrome and Firefox bookmarks within Alfred!

TinyPNG File Resizer

Benzi Ahamed’s TinyPNG resizer filters files on your Mac for .png files, then uses tinypng.org to shrink the file size of the file you selected. Handy way to save time!

This is just a little taster; you’ll find many more workflows on the Alfred forum. Once you start creating your own workflows, you’ll also be able to get help from fellow Alfred users if you have any questions.

The iOS version of Omnifocus has a nice little feature that moves tasks to a random date in the future (depicted by dice – see screenshot). This comes in very handy when you have tasks that you want to get out of your way and you don't have any specific deadlines for them. Interestingly, the MacOS version of Omnifocus does not have this feature. So, I implemented it with AppleScript and an Alfred workflow to call it with a keyboard shortcut.

The AppleScript

Alfred 4 Omnifocus

The script is quite straight forward. It uses the same basic structure as my other scripts for Omnifocus [link]. It is also robust enough to work with multiple tasks. You simply have to highlight them and start the script. Each task will then be moved to a different random date. At the end, the scripts cleans everything up (i.e., it calls 'Clean up' from the 'Organize' menu or when you call ⌘+K in Omnifocus).

Alfred Search Omnifocus

The whole script might look a little bit complex, but you can easily adapt it for your needs. You only have to know the magic happens at the end in the function myDeferDate(). It defines a lower and an upper limit for the random date. To mimick the feature from the iOS version I asked the Omnifocus support team about the limits they are using for their iOS version. They defer tasks randomly between 14 and 90 days, which I also used for my script. However, you can easily change them to fit your needs. You can have even various scripts defining different lower and upper limits, for example, to defer certain tasks further into the future, while others only a couple of days.

In any case, based on these values the script randomly chooses a number of days that are added to the current date. For the starting time I use 5:00 AM, since this is my default time. Again you can easily change it to any other time. However, you will have to convert it into seconds (an AppleScript quirk) by multiplying the hours by 3600, (1 hour = 3600 seconds) – for example, 2 PM would be 14*3600 seconds.

Calling the script with a shortcut

I usually call my scripts with shortcuts defined in an Alfred workflow, which allows you to define a key combination that only works for a specific application – in our case – only when Omnifocus is the current active application (i.e., the Omnifocus window is on top of all other open applications). I use the combination ⌃+⌥+⌘ as a prefix for all of my Omnifocus scripts to avoid a conflict with existing shortcuts in Omnifocus. In this case, for moving tasks to random dates in the future, I use ⌃+⌥+⌘+F, where F stands for future. Again changing the shortcut to another one is extremely simple in Alfred. You can download the workflow from here [link].

I have written already a number of scripts to move around tasks in Omnifocus. For all of them I have defined shortcuts via Alfred workflows. So, if you like this blog post, you might want to check also the following ones, for example, on how to move tasks to