Posted on Jun 7, 2020 • Updated on Aug 26, 2020

Alfred Workflows are 🔥 [Week in Review - Week 23/20]

#alfredapp #macos #alfredworkflows

Hello 👋🏻.

Welcome to my "Week in Review" series. Each week I'm going to share what I discovered, learned, and tested with you. This series will be my own digital garden one day. Let's sow some seeds and jump right into the review.

Last week I skipped my weekly review. I took a week off and enjoyed the time with my friends and family. So this week will contain more links than usual. Let's look at the highlights first.

Highlights

For the first time ever, I reached 1 Mio. Impressions on Twitter! AMAZING. Thank you all!

Alfred is finally improving my workflow on my Macbook. Why did I wait that long... It is very helpful and some workflows are just amazing. My installed workflows are listed below.

Besides playing around with my new favorite app, I got in touch with Recoil. It is a promising experimental state management library for React apps. Jack Herrington posted a video on YouTube (besides one about Deno) about it. Watch it to get to know Recoil.

I had to update and optimize my backup and update scripts for my Unifi-PiHole network setup this week (German article). Some shell commands are still confusing to me so explainshell.com, besides shellcheck for linting, was very helpful.

Spectacle was one of my most-used apps on macOS. When I switched from Windows to macOS I instantly missed shortcuts for resizing and moving windows. Spectacle solved the problem for me. Because it is not maintained anymore I had to find an alternative: Rectangle (there is another one called Magnet, but I did not test it). It is even better because it has snap areas!

Adding tracking (e.g. with Google Tag Manager) to React apps can be a challenging task. Luckily a friend of mine, Lukas found react-tracking from the New York Times. We are going to add it to our current projects! I'm curious if it works out well. Here is an example on codesandbox. What do you use for tracking in React apps? Let me know in the comments below, please.

Stefan Natter 🇦🇹🏠👨🏻‍💻

@natterstefan

Any good clipboard manager for macOS you can recommend?

08:21 AM - 04 Jun 2020

My tweet about clipboard managers was the most interesting of my tweets this week. After reading through the comments I wanted to test Paste first, but then decided to give Alfred a try - and as mentioned above it was the perfect choise (for me). Other people mentioned these tools: CopyClip, FlyCut, CopyQ, Pastebot, Maccy and Clipy. Maccy would be my Alfred alternative.

⛓ Links of the Week

Next time you are looking for music for your video take a look at Jamendo. They offer free music for personal entertainment and various licenses for projects or businesses.
Masonry layouts are still highly coveted (e.g. Pinterest has one) and here is a great React component for you: react-masonry-css.
Quickly run JavaScript with RunJS.
Alexander suggested DaisyDisk when he answered my question on Twitter which apps are a must-have on macOS. With DaisyDisk you can analyze disk usage and free up disk space on Mac. I cleared more than 30+ GB. YES!
Are you looking for a fast, privacy-focused commenting platform then commento is for you.
Shortcut Detective finds applications handling global shortcuts.
SetApp: "Setapp is a desktop suite with a collection of Mac apps inside, like a portable Launchpad. With a Setapp membership, all of these apps are yours."
Nick Alico suggested Yoink for Mac ("Simplify and improve drag and drop on your Mac and speed up your daily workflow.") as another must-have app for macOS. I have not tested it, but want to. It looks pretty promising.
We have created our own closed-software package for Google Maps at Lovely Systems, but google-map-react looks promising.
quickref.dev: Experimental search engine for developers (thanks Catalin)
In our last company review session, I mentioned the page visibility API. "The Page Visibility API provides events you can watch for to know when a document becomes visible or hidden, as well as features to look at the current visibility state of the page.", according to MDN. It can improve the user experience. You could postpone fetching updates on your news site when the tab is inactive to save bandwidth for instance. Check out this article and react-visibility-sensor when thinking about integrating it in your React app.
Using DataLoader to batch API requests
responsive data tables
quotefancy.com - We're on a mission of turning inspiring quotes into beautiful wallpapers