Today, we released Alfred 3.7, which brings support for macOS Mojave.

Apple will be releasing macOS 10.14 Mojave on 24th September 2018, so be sure to update to Alfred 3.7, which is available from the Update tab in Alfred's preferences or from alfredapp.com.

Apple have made a number of changes to the granularity of permissions within macOS, which has led to a few changes in Alfred to keep your experience as smooth as possible.

Take a look at our Getting Started with macOS Mojave guide, for details of the permissions Alfred requires to smoothly integrate with macOS Mojave, as well as tips on setting up syncing on a newly installed Mac.

Alfred celebrates his 8th birthday today, and we can hardly believe how time has flown!

In 2010, we released Alfred 0.4 to friends, and it's hard to believe that eight years later, our incredible community has grown to millions of users around the world.

If all Alfred users were to stand next to each other and hold hands, we'd make a line stretching at least... well, at least somewhere very far from where we started! ;)

In order to mark this milestone, we've decided to make a £5,000 charity donation, shared between Mind, a mental health charity here in the UK, and Emmaus, an international charity working to end homelessness. Every day, we're grateful to work in a warm office on beautiful software, surrounded by a friendly community. These charities aim to help individuals get the support they need to get back on their feet.

Don't forget that if you want to show off your love for Alfred, you can grab some stickers to slap onto your shiny Mac, a snazzy t-shirt or a mug to fill with productivity-boosting coffee on our Alfred online shop.

Whether you joined us in 2010 or only discovered Alfred yesterday, and whether you're simply using the free version or using Alfred's Powerpack superpowers, thank you for being part of this wonderful community! You keep amazing us with your clever workflows, your creative use of snippets and your gorgeous custom themes.

Alfred 3.6 was released yesterday, and brings improvements to the new Bookmarks feature, as well as to Snippets and Clipboard search, File Navigation, Workflows and more!

Improved Chrome Bookmarks Support

We've improved discovery of profiles in Chrome, and you can now choose a profile on each individual Mac (e.g. if you have a work and home Chrome profile).

The bookmarks search is now more flexible, so that words contained in the bookmark itself or its bookmarks folder are matched in any order.

Text Expansion, Snippets and Clipboard improvements

We've added a new Matching option to the Snippets and Text Expansion feature, allowing you to choose to include the contents of your snippets in the Snippet Viewer and from the Snippet keyword.

This option makes it easier to find the relevant snippet, even if you don't recall the name or keyword you've set for it. To use this broader search, enable it in Features > Snippets.

Toggling File Navigation Preview

You can now collapse the right panel in the File System Navigation, allowing you to view longer file titles instead of previewing the file on the right.

While the full name of the selected file is shown at the bottom of the File Navigation window, it can sometimes be more convenient to see long titles for all files.

Use Cmd + Shift + i while File Navigation is showing, or click the arrow in the bottom right to show/hide the Preview panel.

A whole lot more improvements and fixes

As ever, there's more to this release than we can cover in this post, so take a look at the change log to see the full list of changes in this release.

It's been amazing hearing and seeing all of the ways Alfred has helped you boost your productivity, so if you're on Twitter, say hi at @alfredapp and share your favourite uses. :)

When the end of January arrives, we often look back at the resolutions we made a mere month ago, and have since given up. So how about setting a few productivity habits that are easy to stick to?

In this post, I'm sharing five productivity booster changes you can make to the way you use Alfred. Each one should only take you a couple of minutes to set up, and could save you far more time over the year.

1. Create a Custom Search

Think of documentation, wikis or any other site you search frequently. Could you speed up this research by creating a custom search for it?

With a custom search, you can type the keyword for the site followed by your search term, and press Return to launch the results page.

Take a look at our Guide for creating your own custom searches or pop by Alfred's preferences under Features > Web Search to get started.

Share your custom searches with colleagues and friends to save them time too!

2. Stop Repeating Yourself With Snippets

Take a good look at the phrases, links or email responses you use a lot.

How much time would you save by creating auto-expanding snippets for these? It's not just the time it takes to type out the text,it's also the mental energy expended thinking about your response, finding the right link and re-reading yourself to ensure you've answered correctly.

Pop by Alfred's Features > Snippets preferences and check "Automatically expand snippets by keyword" in the top right to get started. If you're new to text expansion, we've created a detailed help page on Snippets to guide you along.

Top tip: If you use Alfred's Clipboard History feature, you can select a text clip in the Clipboard Viewer and press Cmd + S to quickly save it as a snippet!

3. Set Up a File Filter

We accumulate vast amounts of data on our Macs, in more or less organised ways.

With a File Filter workflow, you can tell Alfred where to search, and which file types to include in your search.

For example, you can create a file filter specifically for folders in your main "Work" folder, without the results being cluttered by non-work items.

Equally, you could create a filtered search for your Photoshop files only, saving you from fishing around various folders to find where you put those evasive client files!

Learn how to create your own File Filter Workflows or choose the "Simple Folder Search" example from the wide range of workflows built into Alfred.

4. Set Up Your Fallback Searches

Fallback searches are the list of search options you see when you search for a keyword that doesn't match a result on your local Mac.

By default, these are Google, Wikipedia and Amazon, as these are the most commonly used web searches. With the Powerpack, you can customise these to be your most commonly used web searches or workflows.

Find out more about creating your own fallback searches or set them up in Features > Default Results, under "Setup fallback results".

5. Enable Query History

If you'd like Alfred to remember the last queries you typed, you can enable this in Alfred's Advanced preferences under "Store Typed Query History". You can also choose to show the latest one if you pop up Alfred within 5 minutes of your last query.

If you're already an Alfred pro, why not introduce a colleague to Alfred or one of the features you love most? After all, the more productive your team is, the more you will be too!

Some of the most useful workflows are the simplest.

In this post, you'll discover how to create a hotkey-based workflow which allows you to launch a web search for your current macOS selection or clipboard contents. It's an incredibly quick way of searching the web without re-typing your query, or manually launching a search.

First, let's take a look at my basic workflow.

Each of these two workflow streams consists of two objects; A Hotkey Trigger and a Default Web Search Action.

Taking a look at the first stream at the top, the hotkey is configured to pass the Selection in macOS as argument.

This means that, when text is selected in macOS, pressing the hotkey combination will pass this text on to the next object. In this instance, the next object is a Default Web Search, set to use Alfred's default Google Search and your default browser.

The Default Web Search object is left as default; Google web search, and default browser.

You've now created your first workflow stream, so select some text in macOS and press your hotkey combination to launch a Google search for that text in your default browser.

To create the second stream, select the first two objects, and copy and paste them below. Modify the Hotkey object slightly by setting a different hotkey combo, and choosing "Clipboard Contents" as argument. This hotkey will now trigger a Google search for the last text you copied to your clipboard!

Customising the Workflow

Now that you've created the workflow, you can add other streams and customise them as you need;

• Change the Default Web Search to another search engine like Wikipedia, Amazon, IMDB, Twitter, Google Images, etc.
• Use an Open URL Action with one of your own custom searches for your own work documentation or resources.
• Open the results in a specific browser, rather than your default one.
• Set the second object to be a different action like launching a custom URL where the argument becomes a {query} within your URL.
• Passing the argument to an Output object like Large Type or Write File.

Take a look at how these hotkey-based workflows can save you time and clicks as you go through your day, and create your own variations.