Black Pixel finally announced their plans for Sofa’s file comparison app, Kaleidoscope. The beta of version 2 is now publicly available for testing, and if you purchase now you get 50% off (making it $35).

I’ll likely be writing about Kaleidoscope more as soon I’ve had a chance to play around with it, but here’s a quick tip for the application launcher fans.

Alfred & File Actions

My beloved Alfred recently added a ‘file buffer’, which in essence means you can select a bunch of files and folders from within it and then perform a single action on all of them.

By default, the action list is pretty sparse, but it’s simple to add a basic script that will open the selected files/folders in Kaleidoscope:

You’ll need to go into the advanced options if you want it to work on a group of files:

Now we can perform a comparison just by adding files to the buffer (⌥ + up), entering the action panel (⌥ + right) and typing the action name.

And there we go:

It’s worth noting that the ‘ksdiff’ command line tool could be used instead of the ‘open’ command, but I found that I couldn’t get it to run ‘silently’ (without the Terminal window open) so I went this route instead.

Don’t forget the Finder

Of course if you’re working in the Finder and you’re faced with two files you want to compare, it would be a waste of time to find them in Alfred. You can always create a quick Automator workflow and add that into Alfred too:

Now you can select the files in Finder and just type in your keyword into Alfred.

Just another example where Alfred can make using other tools even easier.

Edit: Updated Alfred v2 Workflow available here curtsey of Mark Shropshires.