Texas outline

October 2011

Convert for Alfred

One of my least favourite things in life is converting between units of measurement, especially when cooking. All my mum’s recipes use imperial units, you see, yet my kitchen’s supply of measuring widgets is exclusively metric. Constantly launching a web browser and running the conversion through Google is just tiresome — but having just made the switch from Quicksilver to Alfred, I decided to have a go at building an Alfred Extension to do quick unit conversions using Google’s calculator API.

To use it, download the extension and install it via Alfred’s preferences window. Summon Alfred as usual, then make unit conversions with:

convert AMOUNT UNIT to UNIT

It can handle anything Google knows about, so queries like

  • “convert 500 grams to lbs”
  • “convert 375 fahrenheit to celsius”
  • “convert 2 cups to liters”

will work just fine. For brevity’s sake, you can omit the ‘to’. Happy trans-cultural baking!