ScreenCastsONLINE has published two brilliant Alfred video guides; a Primer to the features included in the free version of Alfred, as well as a guide to Alfred's Powerpack features.
Presenter Lee Garrett has been using Alfred for over a decade, sharing his insights and recommended features in a very approachable style.
ScreenCastsONLINE offers a 7-day free trial which grants you access to a library of tutorials and guides on a broad range of Mac and iOS software.
You can take a look at the preview for the Alfred Primer tutorial and the Alfred with Powerpack tutorial on their website.
The Alfred Gallery contains hundreds of useful workflows to help you work more efficiently. Workflows hosted on the Gallery are subject to automatic and manual security checks, notarised and signed, ensuring these workflows are safe and work beautifully on your Mac.
Let's take a look at workflows and integrations for design and development.
Content and Images
Need quick mockup text and images? Done! Want to optimise your images for your website? Also done!
Placeholder Images by the Alfred Team
Get placeholder images for design and code
Lorem ipsum by Alex Chan
Generate dummy text
Optimize Images by Alexander Willner
Compress images without losing quality
Image Shrinker by Acidham
Reduce file size and dimensions of images for sharing
TinyPNG by the Alfred Team
Compress images via TinyPNG
Colours and Design
Did you know that when you copy hex codes to your Clipboard History, Alfred will recognise it and offer a colour preview on the right side?
These workflows offer quick colour picking, icon generation and handy size references for print.
Color Picker by Patrick Sy
Colour picker and previewer
Icon Generator by Nathan
Generate icons from emoji and SF Symbols
Paper Formats by Vítor Galvão
Reference International Paper Formats
Development and Coding
Review your code, keep it tidy and look up coding answers. Search all the docs!
Search ALL the Docs! by Chris Grieser
Search developer documentation sites
HTML Element finder by Joost de Valk
Find HTML elements by typing similar characters
What Unicode Character Is This? by Patrick Sy
Find out the components of a string
Howdoi by Benjamin Gleitzman
Instant coding answers
Kaleidoscope Integration by Kaleidoscope
Compare clipboard and file contents with Kaleidoscope
There are many more workflows for you to discover; Browse the Alfred Gallery and join us on the forum where our community share their creations and ideas every day.
Alfred's web searches are one of the easiest features to adopt in your every day Mac life.
In this short YouTube tutorial, we take a look at using the built-in web searches, creating custom web searches in two different ways, setting them as fallback searches, and a quick look at how their power can be boosted with workflows.
Take a look at the websites you use daily, and create a quick custom search to save your future time and effort!
Subscribe to the Alfred YouTube channel for plenty of tips and tricks on making the most of Alfred's features.
In addition, Alfred 5.5.1 is now available for general release, so grab the latest update in-app or from our website.
Apple have announced that macOS 15 Sequoia will be released on Monday, 16th September.
We've been using Alfred 5 on Sequoia throughout the beta versions, and we're happy to say that they work beautifully together. This means that you can upgrade macOS with peace of mind that you'll be able to use Alfred right away.
Ahead of the annual macOS update, Alfred 5.5.1 is now in pre-release. You can update to the pre-release if you'd like to help us test it. Alternatively, we'll be rolling it out to general release in the next few weeks.
Take a look at the Change Log for the full list of improvements and fixes included in this update.
Are you backing up your Mac?
A new macOS release is a good time to start or refresh your backups, whether you use Time Machine or another backup method of your choice.
If you want to only back up your Alfred preferences, you can use our Preferences Backup workflow to make sure you never lose your carefully crafted preferences.
Automation Tasks are the easiest way to create a workflow without a single line of code.
As of today, there are over 200 Automation Tasks you can use to perform specific tasks in macOS completely script-free.
Use Automation Tasks to merge files into a single PDF, crop and resize images automatically, transform text and URLs or move and manage windows on your Mac, there's an Automation Task for that!
You can browse Automation Tasks by adding an Automation Task object to the workflow canvas, and opening its configuration - but that's not the only way to peruse them!
Adding Automation Tasks to your Palette search
Did you know that you can also add Automation Tasks to the Workflow Palette search to quickly search all actions as you build your workflow?
When you search the Palette, all tasks will be included in results, identifiable by their hexagonal object shape.
To do this, open Alfred's Preferences to the Workflows tab, click the "Alfred Gallery" menu at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, and open "Automation Task Options..."
Check the box to "Show Automation Tasks in editor palette search results" to include them in the Palette search.
Hot tip: Check the box to "Automatically keep Automation Tasks up to date" while you're there, as we often release new Automation Tasks, so Alfred will take care of keeping these updated in the background for you.
You can now use the / or \ shortcuts to start searching the Palette, then type the name of the Automation Task or workflow object you need, and press Return to add it to the canvas.
Practical Automation Task workflow examples
We've shared a few everyday use examples of Automation Task based workflows as inspiration:
Need help creating the perfect workflow? Have an idea for a new Automation Task? Join us on the Alfred forum and share your creations with the community. :)
