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.
v3.6 [Jan 26, 2018]
- Improved Google Chrome support: Better discovery of profile folder when there is a single profile; Ability to select profile if more than one profile exists (in Alfred's Web Bookmarks feature preference; not synced, so selected profile can be different per machine).
- Improved, more consistent bookmark search behavior: Now matches arbitrary word order in search query; Flatten unicode space characters for better international word boundary support; Bookmark's folder will now be matched regardless of location in the typed query.
- Added new snippet search options (in Features > Snippets preferences): Snippet content can now be optionally searched in the Snippet Viewer and from the Snippet keyword; Snippet word matching mode can now be disabled allowing for broad non-anchored search to match the clipboard history search.
- Added new option to enable diacritic and unicode case insensitive searching of clipboard history items
Note that with very large clipboard databases, this can have an small effect on performance as Alfred implements a custom SQLite function for matching.
- Snippet Viewer and Snippet keyword now give consistent results.
- Clipboard history and snippet search now treats query spaces as wildcards for wider result matching.
- Improve reliability of sequential snippet expansion (one snippet immediately followed by a second snippet).
- Improve snippet time / date placeholder regex recognition to be more precise.
⌘S on a selected snippet in the Snippet Viewer now edits the snippet in Alfred's Preferences.
- The Large Type options have been moved from Appearance > Options to the Features preferences to make it more discoverable.
- Added new option to set the Large Type font.
- File Search / Navigation.
- Add ability to toggle visibility of preview view in Alfred's File System Navigation view. New button in bottom right of navigation view with shortcut ⇧⌘I.
- Updated search handler to perform less overall queries for lower resource usage.
- Prioritize files above bookmarks in the default file search, i.e. file types selected in Alfred's Default Results preferences.
- macOS 10.13 file search improvements
- Force default macOS metadata query sort order to be more predictable for when Alfred has no internal knowledge in macOS 10.13 (change backed out after Apple fixed bug in 10.13.2).
- Moved metadata query result handling off the event thread for improved responsiveness
- Added subtext to file search placeholders (open, find, in, tags), and added a please wait message if macOS response is slow.
- Fix small memory leak in file actions preview panel.
- New AppleScript to set and remove workflow configuration variables (See AppleScript dictionary).
- Fix connection rendering quirk when adding new objects in canvas by dragging to empty space.
- Also migrate the "with space" option on input objects when updating a workflow with "Migrate my settings" selected.
- Fix AppleScript Run Command definition to make the trigger id argument non-optional.
- Fix help button link in workflow about / environment variables sheet.
- General fixes and Improvements.
- Minor tweaks to default result item re-selection logic and performance.
- Fix selected shortcut highlight color in secondary view selection lists (e.g. navigation and actions views).
- Modernize web search icons for YouTube, Gmail and Weather.
- When using macOS High Sierra and Alfred's Lock command, Alfred will now simulate cmd+ctrl+q for instant lock.
- Add iTunes Mini Player playlist local (non-synced) suffix for unique Alfred playlists per Mac (Improves Mini Player behavior when iTunes is syncing playlists).
- Pressing return on terminal command keyword with no command typed now correctly sets it as the only visible result (framework tweak).
- Tweak to threading for background image loading in preferences Appearance tab to ensure integrity of UI thread.
- Deferred creation of Alfred Preferences package initial subfolders until they are needed, which reduces potential syncing conflicts when first setting Alfred up on multiple Macs and the initial Mac's preferences haven't fully synced / propagated.
- Added additional information when setting up syncing, including a warning when user selects iCloud Drive.
- List of preferences unique to each Mac when syncing moved from Advanced preferences to syncing help page, added help button linking to syncing page.
