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How to Create an Alfred Extension
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How to Create an Alfred Extension

on Aug 18th 2011 with 14 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Subject: Alfred
  • Languages Used: Shell, PHP
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Today, I’m going to teach you how to build a plugin for the popular Mac productivity application, Alfred, with PHP. As you’ll find, it’s a lot easier than you might expect! Even better, this allows us to extend Alfred to provide any additional functionality that we require.

For this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the process of creating your own extension that will retrieve Lorem Ipsum text from Lipsum.com, and copy it directly to your clipboard with a few simple lines of PHP.

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  • http://www.friv2.us friv 2

    Very well, I like this very much.

  • http://twitter.com/drale2k Drazen Mokic

    Really enjoyed this, want to see more from you.

    That Simple HTML DOM Parser is just kickass.

  • http://www.harlointeractive.com Ryan

    I’m gonna start using this for sure!!

  • http://www.caiobianchi.com Caio

    Great Tutorial, love this app launcher.
    hahahaha the southern accent was pretty funny, gotta say…

  • http://www.georgedina.info George Dina

    Didn’t knew about simple html dom parser – it’s a cool library and I will use it in future.
    Awesome video!

  • martin

    Nice work!

    After downloading the script copies the text without any tag.
    Only paragraph: Lipsum ….
    instead of a paragraph tag Lipsum …
    Do you have any advice please?

    • http://jdfwarrior.tumblr.com David Ferguson
      Author

      May have been the wrong version of the script. Check and make sure the script.php is selecting innertext at the end, and not plaintext

  • Bob

    Do we need the powerpack to be able to run these?

  • http://www.mrdocrock.com Doc

    This was a great tutorial, I learned a lot about the DOM Parser; however, for Lipsum Text I’ll stick to TextExpander snippet.

  • Istvan Drahos

    Really nice, and useful tutorial! Thanks.

  • http://twitter.com/brunogama Bruno
    • http://jdfwarrior.tumblr.com David Ferguson
      Author

      I had never heard of Pypsum. The tutorial was more about the process of creating Alfred extensions than getting lipsum text though. I chose my lipsum text extension to create because it seemed like a good one to share with other web devs and it made use of a really cool library (HTML DOM Parser) that I thought other devs might like as well. I’ve used it for several extensions I’ve created including extensions that grab and display WolframAlpha result data, php function syntax (from php.net), package tracking info (from packagetrackr.com), etc.

      Thanks for the tip though. Pypsum looks pretty cool

  • http://www.pabxpromo.com pabx panasonic

    thanks for shared :)

  • http://www.nunomedia.com Nuno

    Thanks a lot. I was searching the web and apparently this blog post was the only one explaining how to create one.

    Love Alfred app.