Open Conference URL

Copyright 2020-2021 Caleb Evans
Released under the MIT license

Open Conference URL is an Alfred workflow which enables you to quickly open links for Zoom and other conferencing services, based on your upcoming calendar events.

Installation

The Open Conference URL workflow requires icalBuddy, which you can install via the Homebrew package manager.

brew install ical-buddy

Once both packages install successfully, you can simply double-click the workflow file to activate it in Alfred.

Usage

To use, simply type the conf command into Alfred, and you will see a list of upcoming calendar events. It does this by including all events within +/- 20 minutes of your system's current time, so even if you're running late to a meeting, the logical event will show.

The workflow also accounts for timezones and Daylight Saving Time (DST). All times are displayed in your system's local timezone.

Preferences

This workflow contains user configuration options for various aspects of the workflow's behavior. To view this preferences file:

1. Right-click the workflow in Alfred Preferences
2. Choose Open In Finder
3. Navigate into the ocu folder
4. Open prefs.json in your preferred text editor

What follows is a description of each preference you can configure. If you are unfamiliar with JSON syntax, you can find many quick tutorials online.

offset_from_today

The offset_from_today is a positive integer representing how many days into the future the workflow should fetch calendar events. For example, a value of 1 will display events from tomorrow alongside events from today.

event_time_threshold

The event_time_threshold is an object that can contain any combination of hours and minutes integers. If an event is within this duration of time (relative to the system's current time), it will be displayed in Alfred's results.

For example, a value of {"minutes": 20} will mean the workflow will only show events whose start time was within the last 20 minutes or whose start time is within the next 20 minutes.

conference_domains

The conference_domains is an array of domain names representing which URLs to check within each calendar event. This domains list determines which links are considered "conference" URLs.

The domains are listed in order of precedence, so if "zoom.us" precedes "google.com" in the file, then the workflow will prefer the Zoom link over the Google Meet link if both are present.

Credits

Kudos to @jacksonrayhamilton for his architecture ideas and feedback on this project.