You’re halfway there, as the song says
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I am in the same exact boat here. Thanks for sharing!
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Reviving this topic to post an idea for using Universal Actions.
The “problem”
Whenever a file is downloaded is usually a good time to act on a it and Alfred is a great tool for such manipulation.
However, to do so on the most recent downloaded file one needs to either:
- Open the Finder, select the most recent file and use the keyboard shortcut for Universal Actions
- Navigate to the file via Alfred and then act on the file.
Since most of the time I want to act on the most recent file, I made a workflow to deal with this through a single hotkey.
Usage
Pressing Global Hotkey Command + Shift + Option + Control + D (aka Hyper + D) will put the most recently modified downloaded file into Alfred’s Universal Actions dialog for further manipulation.
If you want to do the same
Go to the GitHub page and download the workflow on the releases page.
If you want to build the same workflow yourself, all the required parts are there as well.
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Nice!
If you have more complex download “problems” 
this is a great workflow I have been using for a long time to populate Alfred with the contents of Downloads and other folders.
It takes the additional step of selecting a file for action, but it’s very handy and can be modified for all sorts of uses.
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Good addition. UA is a good idea but currently lack workflows.
And there was me thinking that Alfred was just an app launcher. I shall now have to investigate, thanks all!
Found yet another use for Alfred Workflows that can appeal to Things Users.
I’ve just created a File Action that will take the selected item on Alfred:
And will create a Quick Entry note like this:
Should anyone be interested:
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Planning on delving into Universal Actions this week. Would love if it could replace popclip, for those of you that have used UA to replace Popclip has it been sufficient?
UA and Popclip are both extremely useful. But neither can replace the other.
Popclip shows up automatically when you select text. Universal actions can operate on files, not just text, and you intentionally activate its menu. They are very different workflows for different use cases.
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Good to know… I was a heavy PopClip user a few years ago but I ended up sort of building most of the actions I was using in Keyboard Maestro and toggling a palette for 1 action to do what i was using popclip for but I thinK I need to take a look at PopClip again as well.
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popclip is great, just that sometime the popup is in the way once you highlight some text, wish there is a way (may be there already and I did not know) to press a key to suppress the popup menu
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I was an avid popclip user for several years but over the past year+ I completely switched to Universal Actions — both the built in actions and ones that I have added via Alfred workflows.
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What are some of the workflows you’ve been using with UA? I need somewhere to great started with UAs
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You could replace Popclip with UA. It’s a matter of personal preference. I did replace it. Everything in one app.
The good thing is you can select text, double tap shift (my hot key for UA) and select/start typing the action. You can also have modifier key perform different sub action.
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The one that I use the most (which I didn’t have with PopClip) is Email. Several times a day I select a file and the UA Email action to open an email with the file attached. Another one that I use on zoom calls is the action that displays text in big letters (I am not at my mac right now and cant remember the names of these). The first time somebody couldn’t see some text I was displaying and I used that UA to make it big there were lots of ooos and ahs 
I edit a bunch of markdown things (and some html things) and I had added UAs to put markdown tags (e.g. ** or *) around the selected text or etc. I have a bunch of those UAs that I use with some regularity.
Etc. (does that help?)
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Just to add a bit more. I have a UA that copies the selected text to a DevonThink note. I also use the Count Characters and Count Words. The text that got eaten in my previous post (there was text between “or etc.”). I have workflows (that I moved from popclip that surround the selected text with HTML tags for bold, italic, center, etc. just like i have for markdown.
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In addition to the standard Alfred Universal Actions I use Universal Actions to :
- reduce the size of a selected JPEG/PNG file to 1024px on the longest size;
- send a selected file (or selected files) to AirDrop;
- move a selected file (or selected files) to my DEVONthink inbox;
- open a selected URL in Safari (my default browser is Firefox);
- send selected text, quoted, via Messages with a (manually added) attribution of the source.
Stephen
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Can you share the workflow for this?
Would also be interested in knowing what other stuff you do with UA…
I do have a repository on Github which contains some workflows which function as Universal Actions.
I have added it on Github but, be warned, it’s a pretty basic workflow and requires you to set up a macOS Shortcut (which is explained in the workflow User Configuration).
There are many default Universal Actions and some that I’ve added (all depending on whether you select a file, URL or text, of course). Here are some of those that appear when I select a file:
Stephen
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