Introducing Alfred — Personal Productivity
As the first piece of content finds its way here, I feel like a bit of introduction and self-referencing is in order. First of all, let’s create a little bit of context. I am a software developer, working mostly in the Java ecosystem with all of the major tools in that field. That means most of the productivity tips and tricks in these posts will be aimed at that field of work. However, they are not limited to it. That is why, even if you are not a software developer, I still encourage you to read through these posts and try to find ways to help yourself be smarter about your work.
In my previous post Personal Productivity — A Journey’s Start, I told you it’s time to spend some effort on things that will help you. Today’s post is a first step in that direction and it will introduce the tool Alfred on MacOS.
To put it bluntly, Alfred is a replacement for the Spotlight input bar, generally available under ⌘-Space on any Mac. Technically, it can also live alongside Spotlight since you can customise the hotkey. I personally don’t use Spotlight that much, other than to launch applications, which Alfred does just as well. If you’re going with ⌘-Space like me, use this guide to make sure it doesn’t conflict with Spotlight.
Feature Overview
Out of the box you get a lot of features for free. Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of things Alfred does for you without much configuration:
- Search for installed applications (allowing for fuzziness)
- Search in Preferences, Contacts, Dictionary
- Search for Folders, Files per type, either on the whole disk or in a limited scope
- Search and maintain a Clipboard history
- Search through your bookmarks
- Search the Web through pre-configured search engines
- Opening/Sending files from anywhere on your mac
- Access 1Password passwords
- Soooo much more
It seriously pays to simply install Alfred and play around with the free features.
Besides these fantastic features, there are a few more available when purchasing the Powerpack. The Powerpack costs either £45 with life time free upgrades, or £25 for only the current major version of Alfred. The Powerpack gives access to my favourite feature: Workflows. In the next post, I will introduce it and show some simple workflows to start off with.
How do I get started again?
This is a reiteration of why you should be doing this. It’s a point I will be coming back to in every post: be critical about the process you follow in everyday work. You are undoubtedly doing things “because we always do it like this”. Those are the things you have to look at. How can you make it easier for yourself.
And how do you get time for this? Do you ask for it in your project? Nope. Don’t expect to get time for this from anyone. You have to want it and Just Effin’ Do It! (Yep, I just coined the JEDI way to personal productivity 😇)
Thanks for reading and until next time!
— JH
In case you missed it, here’s Alfred’s website: http://alfredapp.com/
