THANKS to the Batman comic canon—including the most recent Gotham TV series, everyone associates the name Alfred with a loyal and tireless butler. This is probably why Running with Crayons Ltd. called its nifty utility for the Mac by the same name.
I had used Alfred—the free version–some time ago, but stopped using it after several OS upgrades, mostly because the Mac’s built-in Spotlight did a terrific job of launching applications and finding stuff on my hard disk.
Out of curiosity, I became reacquainted with Alfred this week.
Alfred runs in the background, so it is always available through the bowler hat on the menu bar. The quicker way to summon Alfred, however, is with a hotkey, so that you don’t have to move from your keyboard to the mouse or trackpad to launch it.
While Spotlight uses Command+Space, Alfred uses Alt+Space. Like Spotlight, Alfred is a capable applications launcher that makes it easy to start a program without going to the mouse. Just type the first few letters of the application you want to run and Alfred will fetch it for you. For instance, on my Mac, Alfred will suggest LibreOffice after I type the first two letters “l” and “i.” To run the program, I merely need to select it and hit Enter.
To find files on your Mac, type “find” and the first few letters of the file name. Alfred will show a list of files that match the search criteria. Select the one you like and hit Enter to reveal the file in Finder.
To open files, type “open” and the first few letters of the file name. Alfred will again show a list of matching files and let you select the one you want, but this time, hitting Enter will open the file in its associated application. For example, on my Mac, choosing a DOC file will open it in LibreOffice, while selecting a KEY file will launch it in Keynote.
On other useful search modifier is to type “in” before the search term. This will search the content of files, such as text in a document, for your search term. To take a quick look at the document without opening it, highlight it and press Shift.
You can also use Alfred to search the Web by typing the keyword assigned to the search engine or website followed by your search term. Typing “google gotham” will launch your default browser and show the results page for your search term on Google. Alfred recognizes a long list of search engines and websites, including Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes, but you can add your own custom searches as well.
These built-in web searches are time savers. Instead of launching your browser, typing in the URL of the site you need, then entering the search term, just let Alfred take care of all that. For example, to quickly find out how to jumpstart a car, you can type “youtube jumpstart a car” into Alfred’s search window.
In my line of work, I search Google News quite a bit, so I created a custom search in Alfred Preferences. This was the Search URL I used: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q={query}
A custom search on Reddit can use this Search URL: http://www.reddit.com/search?q={query}
Alfred also gives you easy access to a calculator. With Calculator enabled in its preferences—the default setting—Alfred will compute the results of any equation you type into the search window.
To look up a word in the Mac’s built-in dictionary, type “define” followed by the word into Alfred’s search window.
Of course, given the recent improvements in Apple’s Spotlight, some folks might skip Alfred altogether, even though the basic version is free. In fact, two months ago, opinion was split on Reddit on a thread called Alfred v. El Capitan Spotlight, is Alfred losing usefulness?
Some users said they had dropped Alfred altogether because Spotlight did most of what they used it for, while others swore by Alfred and pointed in particular to workflows—basically automated tasks that you call up using the program if you buy Powerpack to unlock more of its features.
The Alfred website includes an entire section on useful workflows—but you need to buy the Powerpack license first before using them. A single user license is ₤17. There is a workflow to convert that to Philippine pesos, but I wasn’t willing to pay more than P1,200 to find out how well it works. Besides, you could just as easily type in “google 17 pounds in Philippine pesos” into basic Alfred to get the answer you need.
I do like the free version, though, even though Spotlight seems to be catching up. Chin Wong
Column archives and blog at: http://www.chinwong.com
