Mountain Lion annoyances

As you probably know by now, what was formerly iCal is now Calendar, & Address Book is now Contacts, the better to match iOS. I actually have no problem with the new names Apple chose in Mountain Lion, other than the fact that iCal was at least slightly interesting, as opposed to Calendar¹, which is utilitarian but borrring.

The main problem I’ve seen mentioned about the new names has to do with muscle memory. I hardly ever open apps on my Mac by actually clicking on them. Instead, I use Alfred to launch the app by typing its name (before Alfred, I used Spotlight, which I now hardly ever use & mostly think of as the poor man’s Alfred). A few reviews have mentioned that typing iCal or Address Book is ingrained behavior, & now it doesn’t work. Granted, this is hardly a horrible thing—I’d almost say a really bad papercut would be worse—but it could definitely be an annoyance.

However, I noticed that if you do a Spotlight search for iCal, the top result is for Calendar, & if you do one for Address Book, the top result is for Contacts. Nice. However, these only work in Spotlight, not in Alfred, which doesn’t help me, because I use Alfred to open apps, not Spotlight. So how would I fix this?²

I immediately thought of a workaround: Spotlight comments. Weirdly, it only kinda works. To see what I’m talking about, find Calendar in the Applications folder, select it, & press Command-I to open Get Info. At the top of the Info window is a section labeled Spotlight Comments. Theoretically, if you type something in there, Spotlight indexes it & you can search for it. So if I type in iCal & close the Info window, I should now be able to summon Alfred & type iCal to open the app.

Doesn’t work. So I tried find iCal. Doesn’t work. Huh?

Turns out, there’s apparently a bug. According to Alfred’s website, “…as of OS X 10.7.2, there is a bug in Lion with Spotlight Comments which can cause comments to work unreliably. Apple is aware of this bug and the best solution in the meantime is to use file extensions.” I’m using Mountain Lion, & it appears that bug is still around.

So I followed Alfred’s advice & created file extensions instead. Here’s how to do it for Calendar; after you know it works, you then need to do the same sort of thing for Address Book.

1. Invoke Alfred.

2. Press Command-, (Command & the comma) to open Alfred’s Preferences.

3. Go to Extensions & click on the + at the bottom left.

4. Select File Or Group.

5. For Extension Name, enter Calendar. Drag the Calendar app from Applications onto the icon to give it the correct icon. For Created By & Web Address, put whatever you want. Press Create.

6. For Title, enter iCal is Calendar. I left Description blank, but put in something, uh, descriptive there if you want. For Keyword, enter iCal. For Files, click on the + on the bottom right & select Calendar in Applications. Press Save.

Now try it: invoke Alfred & type in iCal. Press Enter, & Calendar will open! Your muscle memory is preserved.