Note: The WFx extension is not an official WorkFlowy product. It is produced by a longtime WorkFlowy fan and evangelist, whose work we wanted to honor by posting here. It’s important to understand that this plugin can access your WorkFlowy data, and that by using it you are giving an entity other than WorkFlowy permission to manage the data in your WorkFlowy account.
Today’s the launch of the (3rd-party) WFx extension for WorkFlowy. I’ve been lucky enough to use this GENIUS extension for the last couple of years while @rawbytz has been crafting it.
It is no overstatement to say that the WFx Chrome extension will transform the way you get around WorkFlowy and hugely impact your productivity.
WFx will get you around WorkFlowy to any list you can think of… at will. It also allows you to do scores of other cool things. This video will give you a peek into WFx:
- Install the WFx extension here.
- And here’s @rawbytz’s PowerPack page (The special introductory price is going up soon!)
- Here’s a playlist of over 20 screencasts I’ve created especially for WFx.
Why does this PowerPack claim to use “WorkFlowy’s official API”, whilst Workflowy’s support site still says no official API exists?
WFx – sure, I bought it and use it daily. I wanted to eliminate so many tools and keep my life in Workflowy. Initially the need was to replace bookmark manager. No problem. Played with a few others – all great.
BUT, needed to track my time. Started looking at various time trackers and then hit me – would WFx have something? Of course. The time tracker is fine, but I actually prefer Add.
All of my work and tasks are already in Workflowy, so this makes tracking time (love how it sub totals) a perfect fit.
Definitely the PowerPack was the best software investment made this year!
Thank you!!!
In the newest Android version, the little arrows for folding or unfolding are displayed on the RIGHT hand side of items. This takes up too much space (given that cellphone screens are not very wide anyway) and leaves very little space in the center for the actual text. Please revert this change. Thank you very much!
Also, still waiting for separator lines.
To all,
I’m fascinated by the work you’ve done, Rawbytz, and I echo every great thing the others have said. I’ve created many shortcuts already, and have purchased the PowerPack and am just starting to dig into it.
I’ve used Workflowy for several years now. And I believe it can adapt to many aspects of David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done). For example, Frank and others have often discussed their Workflowy products using GTD terminology and examples. As one example, think about how easily the Tags in Workflowy can fit so many GTD contexts. Some of my Workflowy tags come right out of David Allen’s book, such as: @waiting, @Calls, @Work, @Computer, @errands, @groceries, and many more. I believe Workflowy allows for a greater variety and combinations of tags and contexts than any other software I know of.
And here’s another conceptual idea about what Rawbytz has done here, that also intrigues me.
I read somewhere recently, that David Allen plans to finally ‘retire’. And at his most recent ‘GTD World Summit’ recently, he wanted to discuss and share his never-ending and elusive work to design the ‘ideal GTD Productivity App.’ He still contends to this day, that despite years of effort by many accomplished software designers, no software has reached what he envisioned, as that ‘ideal GTD app’. He still sees that ideal productivity app as an elusive ‘Holy Grail’.
At that recent ‘World Summit’ David Allen revealed and made open-source all his own sketches and drawings over the years, of what he thought that ideal software would look like. He encouraged anyone else to take up where he left off, and to continue the development of that ideal software. And to me, the ultimate solution lies not just in the technology, but also in the adaptability of the software to meet the individual needs of every human brain who uses it. The ultimate ‘solution’ to David Allen’s dream will be in the mind of each individual user.
Which is where I think Workflowy shines – in its adaptability and flexibility. I think a lot of both software and conceptual work still needs to be done by people infinitely smarter than myself to arrive at what David Allen envisioned, but with the growth and evolution of Workflowy and also Rawbytz’s work here, I wonder if all this could be a not-too-small step in that direction.
Just some food for thought, nothing more. Thanks again for great work, guys!
Would be so amazing if this could be ported to Firefox, et al. I love Tree Style Tab so much in Firefox and I’d hate to have to go back to Chrome just for this added functionality in WF
Tree Style Tab looks amazing… but with WFx, it amazingly becomes redundant. WFx eliminates the need to manage browser tabs at all. This is done on two levels:
1. WFx opens web pages with intuitive shortcuts… so you don’t need to keep certain frequently-visited sites open in any tab.
2. If you have several tabs open, WFx allows you to jump to existing web pages that are open via the same shortcuts by a dynamic called FTOC (Find Tab or Create).
I only ever keep WorkFlowy open permanently. Some WFx users like to keep multiple tabs open… and they swear FTOC has revolutionized their browser experience. You could easily slip into full-screen mode and forget that you have any tabs at all.
So WFx really manages your browser experience. It eliminates the need to manage tabs. It gets you around at will. Think about it this way… when we want to recall information… we have no idea how or where it is stored in our brains. We just recall it. It’s like that with WFx. It retrieves what we want at will. Not only that… but you can choose whether you want to jump to an already-open tab or jump and refresh. Lots of options.
WFx… together with clipping Web URLs to WorkFlowy via Clip to WorkFlowy have entirely eliminated my need for bookmarks, bookmarklets and tab management. And best of all… it takes up precisely 0% of my browser real estate 🙂
Take a look at the “Web Bookmarks” screencast:
https://youtu.be/xPhNuK7JKmk
Tree Style Tab is not redundant. Trust me. I used Chrome for the last few years before changing back to FF. It’s still faster to scan a bunch of tabs with Tree Style Tab. The Quick Tabs extension for Chrome also allows you to type in a textbox and go to one of your open tabs. But it wasn’t a great solution for me. Once you get 60+ tabs open, the tabs themselves are so condensed that it’s hard to keep track of what you have open. Tree Style Tab gives you more tools to address that.
I know WFx is much more than just the shortcut/tab management, and I’m interested in it. The scripting in the powerpack looks like it could really improve my workflow inside WF. And I can also see how one could create a workflow around it that might mitigate some of my current issues with Chrome.
That said, having tabs on the side along with favicons makes it easier for me to quickly see what I have open without having to memorize a bunch of shortcuts. A lot of my tabs aren’t things like gmail or google calendar. They’re kind of things I’m still looking at for research, etc. Having them visible is part of what reminds me they are still relevant.
Now that Firefox and the New MS Edge are both capable of running Chrome extensions, just wish more people did what was needed to make them run on these other browsers. It’s the one thing I dislike about WF in general. It’s Chrome centric. I switched to Chrome from FF because of WF. And I miss RB’s extension to copy links to WF, cuz it’s the best. But once I got back to Tree Style Tab, I realized how much better it really is.
Perhaps eventually we’ll get some of this stuff as native functionality.
@J-Lon
I’ve done some preliminary testing on Firefox. After getting a “Great news! Your extension is compatible with Firefox.” message from Mozilla’s automated compatibility tester… the actual news on install wasn’t as great, but not horrible either. So I’m reasonably confident this will show up in Firefox Add-ons, but won’t commit to anything until I get everything working. That could be fairly soon, or it may have to wait until the planned v3 is done… which may take a while longer.
Excellent news! Looking forward to it.
As J-Lon, I have switched back to Chrome for WF only. Would love to use FF — and one-day Safari 🙂
Fwiw, WFx seems to work like a charm in the new Chromium version of MS Edge
Can’t wait for FF. I bought the Powerpack. Some great stuff in there.
Ummm…I’m a bit slower than others here. I downloaded the power pack, but for the life of me can’t figure out how to access any of the features once downloaded into workflowy. In the videos Frank keeps popping down a WFx dialog box, but doesn’t say how to access said box. Maybe I missed it which is quite possible. I just don’t see any instructions anywhere.
Hey Cameron. The videos are ordered chronologically… so the WFx prompt shortcut makes its appearance within the first 30 second of the install video… the first video after the promo video:
https://youtu.be/KnLmOZWh3fI
So you can use the default keyboard shortcut (Alt+W) or click on the WFx extension icon to activate it. The rest of the above video is also quite helpful on further steps. Enjoy!
Thanks Frank. Classic example of just not reading through the instructions slowly enough. I’ll watch the videos.
Enjoy!
There is so much depth to what rawbytz has produced with WFx. In a word – ‘AWESOME’!
Kudos to Frank for the videos. Makes it vastly easier to learn. Much gratitude!
Great job to all involved in this! The product and extensibility is impressive as is and looking forward to more to come and the youtube videos are very helpful.
One recommendation for a possibly simple addon:
The ability to export all shortcuts to a particular branch in Workflowy, Idea being as a reference to lookup or printout a cheatsheet of shortcuts, but also that can later be reorganized to adopt and maintain some consistency in naming (such as presentation-related shortcuts start with hyphen, etc). I already am rethinking my shortcut names and yeah I can look at the options but it seems good to be able to reorganize via Workflowy itself.
Also, this might possibly be leveraged to do adopt an on-the-fly shortcut search and completion via the popup dialog (blue sky, but worth mentioning just in case 🙂 )
Thanks again for the work invested!
There is an update planned that will get rid of the current JavaScript prompts, and that should enable some ideas I have for “in-prompt” shortcut helpers. No question though, as your shortcut list grows the best solution is solid shortcut naming convention that works with your brain.
As for export, for now you can select the all the text visible in the shortcuts table, and paste that into WorkFlowy. Not pretty, but it’s a start.
There is also an undocumented shortcut “?”. This will generate a table of all shortcut data in the Developer Tools console (Ctrl+Shift+J). You can click on the header to sort by any attribute.
Like Stefano, I am blown away. This is fantastic. I cannot thank rawbytz and Frank enough for this effort. The PowerPack is essential. I bought it immediately – it has already transformed the way I work.
Same here, Hermann — the guys are our WF Wizards 🙂
Hi @Jay Rawlings,
Any intentions to develop add-ons / plug-ins for Firefox and Safari as well? Would be terrific!
Keep it up.
WFx digs pretty deeply into the Chrome API, so conversion won’t be trivial. I have looked at Firefox, and it is the most likely candidate, though some features may not convert easily. Under current circumstances, Safari will not happen.
Thanks for the heads-up!
Are you in talks with the WF team regarding a possible integration for the mobile apps, especially iOS and iPadOS?
“Are you in talks with the WF team regarding a possible integration for the mobile apps, especially iOS and iPadOS?”
Just wanted to thumbs-up Stephano’s question. I just very happily purchased, and would be happy to purchase an iOS app or add-on as well.
Blown away! I already have created over 68 shortcuts.
I have some ideas for improvement. The most interesting being:
– What about allowing to chain several JS shortcuts within a single one — and possibly one WEB shortcut at the end? I am thinking “automation” here 😉
Well done @Jay Rawlings!
I’ve had this thought and I agree it would be great. I get the same effect by using a macro app (BetterTouchTool on Mac, or AHK on Windows). This way I can setup a keyboard shortcut to run a list of WFx commands. Takes some tinkering but produces the same result you’ve described.
Good starting alternative.
A barebone approach would be to manually put together the needed features in a JS shortcut. I just have combined the following in RELOAD TOGGLES:
—
(function headerToggle…)();
(function expandNotesToggle…)();
(function wideScreenToggle…)();
—
Obviously, any bug fixes or enhancements will not be automatically updated 😉
Thanks Stefano, glad you like it!
re: chain
There is a lot of “it depends” in the answer. Right now the scripts are stand alone, self-contained, and not designed to be linked. The functions literally return nothing, so chaining would require code changes.
One of the beautiful features of the WFx/PowerPack architecture is it very easy to test and deploy new scripts. In fact, many of the existing scripts are the result of beta tester suggestions. So reach out to me via the Slack channel or email (rawbytz at gmail), and let’s see what we can do.
My intention is PowerPack is a living “document”.
Happy to have some discussions with you. I will reach out to you.
Developer here.
WFx DOES NOT collect, transmit, store, or share any user data. EVER.
The only user data it “uses” is it queries your open brower tabs looking for a matching tab for the Find Tab or Create feature. And let me repeat, regarding those tab URLs too:
WFx DOES NOT collect, transmit, store, or share any user data. EVER.
It will inject JavaScript into your WorkFlowy page to help you do things faster. NOTHING ever comes out. Chrome Extensions are open source. The code is not obfuscated. Feel free to inspect it anytime to confirm that the above is true.