Alfred workflows to increase your productivity

If you haven't been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you should already be well aware of the launcher app Alfred and the incredible power it offers to boost your productivity.

It not only saves you a lot of time when quickly firing up any kind of program, but also contains a lot of other nifty features for speeding up your daily processes.

Today I want to talk more in detail about workflows, which cover all kinds of tasks from quick documentation lookup to character encoding, and thanks to an extremely busy community, there are already plenty of these out there.

Have in mind that you need the Alfred powerpack in order to work with workflows, which comes at an extra cost of 17 GBP.

Let's go over a few that I find particularly interesting for web developers:

caniuse

This workflow allows you to have a quick look at the compatibility tables at caniuse. It shows up search results while you're typing and includes a preview of supported browsers, so you don't even have to go to the site itself.

https://github.com/willfarrell/alfred-caniuse-workflow

colors

Ever struggled to find out the rgba equivalent of a hex color, or vice versa? With colors, you can just type in a shortcut, and all its corresponding equivalents show up in the results that you can easily copy/paste to the application you're working in.

https://github.com/zenorocha/alfred-workflows/tree/master/colors

dash

This workflow is a Alfred representation of massive library of documentation for all kinds of programming languages. MongoDB, node.js, Compass, PHP, Ruby, Python? Dash has them all, and this workflow gives you quick access to them in an auto-complete search fashion.

https://github.com/willfarrell/alfred-dash-workflow

encode/decode

Ever used Eric Meyer's url encoder and wondered why you always have to go to your browser to URL encode or decode a certain character? With this shortcut, you can get it copy/paste ready into your clipboard.

https://github.com/willfarrell/alfred-encode-decode-workflow

el/entity

You probably don't remember all the HTML encoded version of all the special characters there are on your keyboard. With this workflow, they are just a finger tip away, by typing in the command and the character you are looking for, it shows up a list of HTML equivalents that you can quickly copy and paste to your editor of choice.

https://github.com/ajgon/alfred2-html-entity-lookup

tinypng

If you find it time-consuming to crush your PNG images to the limit, this plugin makes it a snap. It allows you to shrink the currently selected PNG files in the finder and saves them in a predefined folder for easy access.

http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/1520-tiny-png-workflow-updated-to-v12/

Transmit

Being my favorite FTP client, Transmit access is essential during my daily workflow. This plugin provides a shortcut to all my favorite servers via the simple shortcut "ftp". This makes accessing them a snap by simply choosing the desired server from the dropdown list.

https://github.com/BigLuck/alfred2-transmit

chmod

Do you find yourself guessing the right combination for file permissions? This tool immediately tells you what the seemingly cryptic combinations of octal notation, like 744, 622 or 541 stand for.

http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/3164-unix-file-permissions-chmod-converter/

vm

When you're actively testing your websites on different platforms (you should) you are probably using virtual machines to some extent. This plugin in particular fires up a new Virtual Box instance with a simple key stroke.

http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/4080-vm-control/

Conclusion

Whether you use Alfred or not, it is apparently a huge time saver, especially when you're doing a lot of tasks with the mouse that could be done with the keyboard instead.

Do you have any more suggestions?