Now, Alfred has a new assistant called Alfred Remote-a $5 iOS version of Alfred that lets you control your Mac from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The more you use it, the more Alfred learns about you in order to help you work more quickly and efficiently.Ĭreate your own Alfred workflows to make these shortcuts more efficient.Īlfred has become so ingrained into my workflow that I find it painful to work on a Mac without it. Almost anything that’s stored on your Mac is fair game for Alfred. Not only can you launch apps this way, but you can open files, folders, emails and contacts, perform web searches, copy/move files and folders, and a whole host of other actions. Either hitting the Return key or selecting a Command-key option will open the selected item. As you begin typing the name of the app you want to open, Alfred starts displaying matches, narrowing down the list as you continue to type. Rather than clicking on an icon in your dock or rummaging through your Applications folder, you simply type a key-combination (Cmd+Space, in my case) to bring up a text input window. Yes, Alfred is an app-launching tool, but it can do so much more.Īt its most basic, Alfred is an app-launching utility. Running With Crayons and haven’t looked back. I’ve tried all of them and, while all have their merits, I eventually landed on Alfred by But when developer support fragmented, other apps like Quicksilver was one of the first of these utilities, and I was a big fan. So, it seems ironic that there’s a relatively new category of Mac productivity apps that lets us control our Macs from the keyboard. Alfred is working so much better here.The introduction of the Macintosh back in 1984 helped release us from the bondage of theĬommand-line interface. It almost feels as Alfred is the young guy running miles and miles without getting tired, and Spotlight is the creepy old man trying to find his way across the system. Alfred is faster, and it never gives me a spin-wheel. I have lots of folders and subfolders in Dropbox, and Spotlight takes 5 seconds to find one. I can’t wait for the Powerpack to add Applescript and Clipboard capabilities.īack to Dropbox, though, the best thing about Alfred it that it retrieves folders inside it instantly. No need to use iTunes, you just fire up Alfred as you normally would. ![]() The Powerpack (still in development) lets you navigate the file system using your keyboard and play songs from iTunes using the built-in Mini Player. If I need a quick word definition, I type “define” and the definition I need shows up in Dictionary.app. The application is smart enough to understand in a few keystrokes whether you’re looking for a file in the Finder or not, and lookup on Google or Wikipedia opens a new tab in your default browser. It takes seconds to install and search results are literally instant as you type. So I installed Alfred and replaced the default CMD+Space shortcut.Īlfred is lightweight and fast. Moreover, I felt that I needed something that would allow me not only to search locally: I want the application launcher to be smart and allow me to either look for something already on my machine (files, folders) or on the web. My Mac is just fine, Spotlight just doesn’t help me finding stuff the way it used to do. It used to be fast and gave me instant results, it became slow, clunky and unreliable. Spotlight started acting weird on me, or maybe it just couldn’t keep up with my workflow anymore. I started re-thinking my Mac setup, and I went for a “let’s store anything in Dropbox” simple policy. Basically, I had a new filesystem accessible from anywhere I installed an instance of Dropbox. Thanks to some referral codes I threw out there and the awesome people who signed up through them, I got almost 10GB of free file storage in the cloud. Then something happened over the past months: I started storing lots of files in my Dropbox. ![]() I was a regular and happy Spotlight user who didn’t need to install a new tool to search my Mac faster. ![]() Cody reviewed Alfred app for Mac when it first came out in March, but I didn’t really care about the application back then.
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