Behind the App: The Story of Alfred | Hacker News Reader

Behind the App: The Story of Alfred

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50 pointssrikar7 comments

Over a decade ago, I wrote something similar (but not as advanced) that I still run on any Windows machine I use - http://chime.tv/products/hotchime.shtml

When I switched over to a Mac as my primary machine 4 years ago (Jan 2010), I tried Quicksilver, which was the closest replacement to my app. It was ok but never really felt as snappy as my Windows app. After a few months of trying to make Quicksilver work, I was on the verge of porting my app to OSX when I came across the newly launched Alfred.

I have been a very satisfied user ever since. The moment a family/friend of mine gets a Mac, the first thing I tell them is to install Alfred. I'm so glad the Pepperrells built Alfred. They saved me a lot of time I would have spent (1) porting over my app to OSX (2) manually launching apps in the meantime.

Doesn't the new search feature in Yosemite make Alfred obsolete?

No. Or, I should say, I don't think so. Alfred is actually about much more than basic search. There's a whole framework there and you can write custom "workflows" for it, which are - essentially - "Alfred apps".

For example (just picked this at random) - someone wrote a Gmail client for Alfred:

http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/4744-gmail-client-for-alfre...

If it was extendable then yes, but I don't think Apple is going to allow this without some modifications.

I'd be rather surprised. My main uses for Alfred are:

1. Launching apps.

2. Searching developer documentation with Dash. I can pop up Alfred and type "dash nsstring" and it'll show me the docs for that class.

3. Clipboard history. If I type "clip" it shows me everything I've copied to the clipboard in the past day. I can filter that by typing. Pressing return pastes the selected entry.

4. Hotkey actions. The main one I use binds cmd-shift-5 to a custom script that starts the GUI action for taking a screenshot of a selected area of the screen, then uploads the resulting image to my web server and places the URL on my clipboard.

5. Searching Google by just typing stuff into the Alfred bar.

6. Invoking Wolfram Alpha by typing "w stufftocalculate".

7. Searching Wikipedia by typing "wiki stufftosearch".

Of those, I don't think 2, 3, 4, 6, or 7 have any hope of being replaced by Apple. 1 could, but on the other hand this has in theory been supported by Spotlight since 10.4, and it's just been too unreliable and slow. I doubt they'll finally get their act together on it now. 5 is the only one that seems likely to be obsoleted by Yosemite, and that's a minor one.

Do you know a place to find more examples like these?

When I was re-learning Vim a few years ago, I found things like VimCasts to be incredibly useful -- reading documentation is one thing, but seeing how experts use the tools made a big difference in understanding for me. I suspect something similar would be helpful in moving beyond using Alfred as an application launcher and file explorer.

I usually just google "alfred (something I do) workflow". For example, I wanted to be able to turn Caffeine on and off through Alfred. There's a workflow for that. I wanted a timer. Yep, already there. Look up the weather? Sure.

Alfred seems to have enough enthusiastic users that whatever you do regularly is probably done regularly by someone else as well.

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