Interview: Alfred Picks Up Where Quicksilver Left Off

Alfred is a new keyboard launcher in the spirit of Quicksilver, Butler and LaunchBar.

A (free) beta was released last weekend by the UK-based team who’ve developed it.

If you’ve ever used any of those other keyboard launchers, Alfred will be instantly familiar. You invoke it using a global shortcut, then type whatever you want to find. Type an app name to launch it, or type “google” then your search term to search Google.

It has built-in shortcuts for searching Google, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Bing, Twitter and plenty of others. It can also hunt down specific files or folders on your hard disk.

What it can’t do – yet – is the complex “noun-verb” style command that Quicksilver devotees loved Quicksilver for.

One thing that impresses me most about Alfred is its speed. Most keyboard launchers need to spend some time indexing your drive before they can be helpful, but Alfred was up and running in seconds. If it did do any indexing, it must have done it in the background without bothering me.

Curious to know more about the hows and whys behind Alfred, I contacted the team and spoke to Vero Pepperrell.

She’s been a Mac user since childhood, and has been an avid Quicksilver user for years. But as Quicksilver development slowed down, she and her husband Andrew looked around for something to replace it.

The trouble with alternatives like Butler, Google Quick Search Box, and LaunchBar, she says, is that they’re not simple enough out of the box.

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“Butler, for example, requires a certain understanding of what you’re doing. We wanted something anyone could use immediately. I wanted something my dad could use.”

So Alfred was born. Designer Oliver Kavanagh – a friend of the Pepperrell husband-and-wife team – was brought in to “make the app look amazing”.

The future is already mapped out, says Vero.

“At the moment we are planning that it should remain a free app,” she says. “And we will be opening it up to third-party developers who want to create plug-ins. All the extra stuff, like controlling iTunes, will be stuff we’ll want Alfred to support in time.”

8 comments »

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Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in News, OS X, Reviews, Software |

Alfred
What an awesome name.
http://williesite.tk Willie P.
Remind me why this is better than spotlight?
The only advantage I see is being able to type “google ______” or “imdb _____” etc… to get search results. Otherwise, it’s just another application taking up space in my menu bar. Or did I miss something? ‘Cause spotlight is wicked fast on my computer…
Knightlie
This will need something to differentiate it from Spotlight. I have Butler configured, but don’t use it enough to even start it up – I can’t help thinking Alfred will end up the same way. Typing “google” doesn’t seem that much faster than the search box in Firefox, particularly with my rubbish typing.
It does look great, though.
CWJ
Why is this better than QS? Because it’s closed source and lacks features I use daily?
Oh, wait.
Jim
Name is OK, but taken. Search Version Tracker and macUpdate and you will find it has been used for Julien Dufour’s plugin manager for at least 7 years. Perhaps a more unique name would be less confusing?
HalSF
I like it a lot. It doesn’t make me want to uninstall Quicksilver ÃŸ57 (3840) by a long shot, but it’s a lightning-fast, looks sweet, and I’ve never warmed up to the Spotlight interface way off in upper-righthand-corner Siberia.
It never ceases to amaze me when commenters unleash their nit-picky little inner trolls on a nifty piece of FREE utility software. Get a refund, bitches!
http://alfredapp.com Vero Pepperrell
Knightlie: We’re aiming to make it faster to search anything, from Google Maps and Amazon to eBay and IMDB, as WELL as your local computer. It may only shave seconds off of doing a search each time, but knowing how many searches most of us do in a day, it does add up.
Since we were only anticipating a tiny beta group (and got +3500 more users than expected!), I haven’t yet created much help documentation yet – hence why you may not have discovered the full breadth of possible searches. Keep an eye out for some help pages on what Alfred can help you do!
CWJ: Keeping in mind the app was launched under four days before you published your comment, I’m hoping you’ll give us a bit of leeway before comparing it to an app that has had years to mature.
I’d suggest keeping an eye out for the next few releases, as this week’s helpful user feedback is enabling us to pick out the top requested features and most useful additions to make. I suspect you’ll be pleased!
Alfred: You’re welcome, we think so too ;)
- Vero
Community Gal for Alfred App
Derik
You had me until:
“Why Can’t I search for apps with non-continuous letters, e.g. ff for firefox?
Due to the nature of Alfred, the initial search results are fast, focused and not noisy. By adding non-continuous terms, you would see much noisier search results and much less likely fall back onto a web search when you want to.
Having said this, a future feature will be the ability to assign shortcut terms to particular searches so you could assign the search term ‘ff’ with launching firefox anyway.”
Non-contiguous search was and is the entire reason I use utilities like LaunchBar and Quicksilver. I really don’t see any point in launcher like this without that support.