Alfred has a ton of ways to make your Mac life more productive, like launching apps, commanding your OS X system, and even sending quick emails to your contacts. With the £15 Powerpack installed, Alfred lets you create incredibly detailed and complex customized commands using keywords, hotkeys, and actions, all within the app itself.
But if you’re like me, you’re not a huge fan of re-inventing the wheel. There’s a whole community of folks smarter than me who have made their own Workflows with Alfred and have exported these for everyone to download, import, and use with Alfred.
Let’s take a look at how you can grab some of the best of these, and get them working for you on your own Mac.
I’ll use David Ferguson’s excellent AlfredTweet workflow to walk through this tip, but this should be similar with many others, which can be found here on the Alfred website.
First, download the workflow, in this case from Ferguson’s own website. Once you’ve gotten it on your Mac, double click on it in the Finder and Alfred’s preferences window will show up, with an “OK” box to click. Let the workflow import, and you’ll be taken to it on the Workflows tab in Alfred to give it a looksee.
Now, in the case of AlfredTweet, you’ll need to set up a few more variables, like your Twitter details. Activate Alfred, and then type ‘alfredtweet’ in the resulting Alfred field, sans quotes. Click on “Setup AlfredTweet,” or hit return if it’s the top hit. Your default browser will launch if it’s not already open, and you’ll be asked to authenticate to Twitter with your login name and password. Go ahead and do so, and let AlfredTweet have the necessary permissions. You’ll have to copy and paste a code into AlfredTweet as well, which only showed up when I used Safari for this process.
To import any other workflows to Alfred is just as simple. Download the workflow, double click on it in the Finder, and then use Alfred to activate it. The possibilities are endless, and you can even make your own Alfred workflows if you really get into it.
