Well, there goes Alfred.
That’s the first thought I had when I saw the new Spotlight in OS X Yosemite. I feared Apple had basically made my favorite little app launcher obsolete (we nerds call it “sherlocked”).
I was wrong.
It’s six months later, and Alfred is doing just fine, thanks largely to a vibrant community built around its power features, or workflows. Spotlight may be able to quickly launch an app from anywhere, but Alfred can tell the weather, eject attached hard drives, and control your Nest thermostat.
And now, after five years on the Mac, Alfred is making the leap to iOS with a new companion app called Alfred Remote. Released today, it’s not going to be useful for most people, but serious Alfred users will love it. If anything, it’s evidence that you can still build a great app and community around core features offered by Apple.
“Yosemite hasn’t really taken anything away from us,” said Vero Pepperrell, one half of the two-person team behind Alfred, to Cult of Mac. “It has in fact enlightened a huge number of Mac users to the benefits of quickly accessing their apps and files. They then realize they need more, which is where Alfred enriches their experience far more, with significantly more features, even as part of the free version.”
Alfred Remote is designed to be an alternative to hotkeys and keywords on the Mac. By pairing an iPhone or iPad with a Mac running Alfred, users can assign app icons and triggers for specific actions, whether it be putting the computer to sleep or controlling iTunes.
When I first heard the pitch, I wasn’t sold. But then again, I’m not that much of an Alfred power user. I use a few workflows on the Mac for stuff like controlling Spotify and searching YouTube, but nothing too fancy.
The real value, even for someone like me, occurs when you start chaining together different actions in one shortcut, explained Pepperrell.
Pepperrell has a “Good Morning” coffee bean icon on her iPhone that launches the websites and apps she uses on her Mac every day. Another “Good Night” shortcut could quit all open apps, perform a backup to a remote server, etc.
Like the recently released Workflow app on iOS, Alfred Remote’s usefulness is really up to the imagination of its users. The Remote app’s pages can have different tasks chained together, like Google searching the last thing pasted to your clipboard. Alfred Remote beta users have already “created pages to add the current Web browser page to Evernote, connect to remote Macs, restart Web servers and more,” said Pepperrell.
Alfred Remote costs $4.99 in the App Store, and the Mac app is free with an optional £17 (around $25) upgrade to unlock power features.
Many great apps have fallen to the wayside over the years after Apple introduced similar functionality, but Alfred’s developers aren’t fazed by how Spotlight is starting to encroach on their territory.
“Those who’ve followed the development of Alfred over the past five years know we’re constantly evolving the products,” said Pepperrell. “There are some stunning features planned for both Alfred on Mac and Remote, which will continue to better our productivity as Mac users.”
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
5 responses to “Indie productivity app Alfred refuses to let Apple steal its thunder”
Huge fan of Alfred 2 (have the powerpack), and love its workflows – looking forward to seeing where they going with this.
That being said, ActionsApp for iPad is another option that (strangely) doesn’t enjoy as much attention as I think it warrants… It’s deeply developed, and offers cross platform productivity – and is well worth a look if this kind of iPad-Mac integration interests you…
Probably still going to get Alfred Remote out of support to the Alfred Developers, but figured I’d just mention an amazing alternative.
Yeah I almost forgot the Actions. Gave it a try years ago. The design philosophy of Actions is weird; they tend to handle everything on the remote end, instead of setting workflows on the target computer. As a result, the best thing you can hope from Actions is letting it send a bunch of hotkeys in sequence. And if you need to do something that involves more than one applications, your best bet is to set Automation script as service and assign global hotkey to it. Don’t think that’s a super brilliant approach for such purpose.
BTW, It looks like the dev had abandon Actions, and switched to some new project called HoloBase.
Also wondering about Holobase – has me a bit worried that ActionsApp will come to an end.
I take your point about Alfred all being the remote side – but that’s kind of what I like. It remains more of a visual trigger for me, someone who’s always forgetting his shortcut keys!
That being said – I’ve created some pretty complex flows, spanning mulitple applications in some instances. With Keyboard Maestro and Shortcat App installed on the Mac, and ActionsApp allowing for text snippet insertion, it’s possible to string together a serious string of actions, all with the tap of a single button.
I’n probably in the minority i.r.o. that usage, but it remains possible.
Seems like an ad to me! The searching in Yosemite is so bad, Iv been using windows new search for work and nothing compares.
wow, talking about an ad, hahaha!