Saturday, June 05, 2010

Mac OS X Launcher: Alfred

I like this new launcher for OS X: Alfred. It's pretty simple. If you are having stability problems with Quicksilver, or just want something simpler, it's worth checking out.

Call it up with a hotkey (like Ctrl+Space). Start entering letters and it will show you matching apps, bookmarks, and other stuff, including Spotlight comments you've tagged your files with.

Use open foo to choose a file to open, and find foo to show it in the Finder instead.

You can easily define custom web searches. "google porsche" will do a Google search for "porsche". I added a Yubnub command so I can do things like "yu xe -amount 100 -from USD -to CDN".

And that's it. I like the simplicity.

Alfred screenshot
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3 comments:

  1. Thomas David Baker6/07/2010 2:32 a.m.

    Very nice. Only the Remember the Milk plugin for Quicksilver would stop me switching to this.

    How did you add the "yu" command? I can't find any documentation for adding commands and I need to write an rtm plugin :)

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  2. Thomas David Baker6/07/2010 3:07 a.m.

    Found it ... "Custom Sites". Not so good if you don't want to open a browser :(

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  3. Jonathan7/21/2011 8:28 p.m.

    @bakert - yeah, Alfred's "Custom Sites" is a rather cumbersome way to add new commands.

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