How Alfred App Can Make You a More Efficient and Productive Designer
We’ve been avid Alfred users for years now and it’s been one of the apps/tools we use because it allows us to be more productive and efficient. We often notice people might have heard of Alfred but don’t actively use it. That’s why we wanted to write a quick article about what it is about Alfred we love so much and why we think everyone, especially people in the digital creative industry can benefit from incorporating Alfred in their daily workflow.
In case you’ve never heard of Alfred App; it’s an Mac OS tool that makes you more efficient by letting you use hotkeys and keywords to search, launch and control files and apps on your Mac. Consider it to be Mac OS’ spotlight search bar on steroids. We’ve found that most people who have heard of Alfred yet aren’t using it, often think Alfred isnt’ any different from Apple’s Spotlight search. In many ways it’s similar, considering Apple took a good hard look at Alfred when they created Spotlight.
We do want to let everyone know there’s so much more to using a search bar than just launching apps or doing quick math calculations. That’s why we wanted to try and convince them and people who are new to Alfred of its powers and benefits for you as a Mac user or even more specifically, as a designer.
Web search
One thing we love about Alfred App is its ability to use and create (custom) web searches. This feature has already saved us many hours searching for content on a specific domain straight away. ‘Hours’ might sound like a exaggeration but that’s the power of using a tool like Alfred; all those seconds you save add up to minutes, and those minutes add up to hours.
The way Alfred’s web search works is simple yet really useful. By default Alfred already has a few web searches set up for you like Google, Google Images and YouTube. Alfred also allows you to add your own custom web search which comes in very handy for us designers.
A few of our favorite custom web searches are: Dribbble, IconFinder, Noun Project, TheSaurus and Google Images on iOS device resolutions. By entering your search word right away in the Alfred search bar you’ll save up a couple of seconds everytime you go on Dribbble.com to look for inspiration by searching for a specific key word. Or you safe up time entering the right dimensions when you’re looking for a screenshot from an iOS app on a specific iDevice resolution on Google Images. For example; exclusively search for recent Google Images results that have an iPhone 7 portrait screen resolution.
Alfred App has a nice guide on how to add/customize web searches on their website, right here
Workflows
Another thing Alfred App does is allowing you to create and use Workflows. Workflows open up a whole new world of endless possibilities to set in action a chain of events for one or multiple apps by just one trigger. Lucky for us there’s a pretty large community of smart people who’ve created tons of Workflows that allow you to search through or control popular apps. Alfred has made quite a few Workflows available on their website . Packal also has a nice overview of Alfred Workflows.
A couple of Workflows that are much simpler than those made by the community are the following ones we made ourselves. They allow us to get to files and apps a lot quicker.
Search for certain files
Although not the most complex Workflow ever made, we do use these ones a lot throughout the day. They allow us to use the Alfred search bar to look exclusively for Sketch files, or for any other file format.
Launch a group of apps
If you use your computer for both business as well as for personal use you’ll find yourself launching and closing work related apps at the beginning and end of your work day / session in order to keep your RAM in check. We’ve created a workflow that allows you to quickly launch or close a custom group of work related apps. You can get them here. Make sure to dig around in the workflows and remove or add your own frequently used apps.
Our favorite third party Workflows
It’s easy to get ‘fooled’ into installing tons of Workflows as everything seems super useful. We’ve learned however that — at least for us — in real life you won’t remember to actually use more than about eight Workflows. Perhaps this is just a personal experience but it’s probably due to the fact that as a user you need to actively remember what Workflows you have installed, especially when they’re triggered with a acronym keyword.
Some third party Workflows that we use on a regular basis are:
- Lorem Ipsum by David Ferguson generates quick pieces of lorem ipsum
- CharCount by Ruan Verhey allows you to instantly show how much characters a text consists of
- Case Converter by Derick Fay lets you quickly change the casing of a piece of text
- Colors by Tyler Reich converts color formats (eg. HEX to RGB), also works with NSColor and UIColor
- Units by Thijs de Jong, is a unit converter
Note that Workflows are available if you have the Powerpack; Alfred’s premium license.
Snippets
The Snippets feature has been added in Alfred 3 and it works terrifically. We were avid TextExpander users before but we weren’t really feeling their subscription pricing plans so we were in need of a replacement tool. Although Pastebot by Tapbots seems promising, we do love having snippets in Alfred. If you’ve been using TextExpander before and want to give Alfred Snippets a go, someone made a nice TextExpander-to-Alfred3 converter tool to make life easier .
Custom themes
One thing we love about Alfred over Spotlight is that it allows for theme customization.
There are many themes available by default and it’s incredibly easy to make a few edits to existing themes in order to create an entirely new one. Some time go we shared our own theme ‘Haze’ with the world. It’s a OS matching theme and you can get it here
We sincerely hope that after having read about how we use Alfred you’ll (re)consider using it yourself. Just to be a 100% clear; we don’t have any personal gain from anyone outside of our own team using Alfred. We’re just fans and hope you’ll be too!
Download Alfred App here
Originally published at blog.yummygum.com.
