Alfred is a program that can definitely help you boost up your productivity. With its help, you can immediately make calculations, search documents on your Mac, take control of iTunes, manage your clipboard data, and so much more.
The utility is packed with easy-to-configure settings, so you don't need much computer experience in order to use this tool on your Mac. Still, if needed, you can find on the homepage of the developer plenty of useful instructions regarding the use of this program.
Alfred lives on your Menu Bar from where you can access its Preferences panel. The first thing you need to do is to define a hotkey for immediately revealing Alfred's main window. On this screen, you will be able to enter your commands. For example, you can write "13.5*0.24" and the utility will immediately make the calculation for you and give you access to accurate results. You can also use Alfred to immediately launch programs, open documents, search contacts in Mac's Address Book, etc.
Furthermore, if you're using the full version of the product, you can design your own workflows to complete tasks more efficiently and cut down repetitive manual assignments. The program lets you link various global hotkeys, tasks, and keywords.
The only thing you need to consider is that some of Alfred's features are already available on your Mac. The Spotlight utility has many of Alfred's capabilities.
Hence, I can't find a single bad thing to say about this tool. It works perfectly, provides you with many useful advantages, and comes with a fair price. Give it a try if you're looking for a way to boost up your productivity.
v1.3 [Jul 4, 2012]
- Notification Center:
- New Advanced > Notifications prefs for 10.8 to use Notification Center instead of Growl for notifications / extension outputs
- Option to remove notifications from Notification Center by clicking on them (in Alfred's Advanced > Notifications preferences)
- Contextually show Notification Center [instead of Growl] in Script Extension prefs if NC being used in 10.8
- Search for kMDItemKeywords when looking for Applications to allow e.g iCal to match Calendar
- Option to escape $ in extensions, fixing a long standing issue with great extensions such as AlfredTweet
- Minor performance improvements when cleaning up Alfred window
- Update to compiling with Xcode 4.4
- Option to remember destination history for copy/move actions to save re-searching for folders (on by default in Alfred's Features > File Navigation preferences.
- More friendly OS X "Contacts Access" request message
- Allow numerics in scheme part of URL recognition Bug Fixes:
- Fix dragging images directly from Safari into image wells (for custom search icons etc)
- Fix Emacs key binding interference with new File Buffer keys
- Prevent 1p from being prefixed to 1Password names in Alfred's preferences
- Make File Buffer preferences Powerpack Only (accidentally left in for non-functional prefs for non-Powerpack users)
- Add new isMountainLion framework to start introducing new Mountain Lion features e.g. Notification Center
- Make Powerpack code field slightly wider to cater for different font sets
- Implement delegate to always show 10.8 notifications, even if Alfred is active
- Fix cmd+ shortcuts in file system navigation which was broken in improving file buffer emacs bindings support
- Fix URL detection which was incorrectly treating email addresses as urls when using the email keyword
- Fix a few spelling mistakes in Alfred's preferences
