On Monday, we announced Alfred 3 and shared the first few sneak previews of the new features.

It's been so uplifting to finally share with you that version 3 is on its way, after months of work. The enthusiasm and excitement we've seen this week from the Alfred community has been amazing. It truly is a fantastic energy boost to help us along the final stretch ahead of release! :)

We’ll be sharing more sneak peeks and details about the new features and improvements in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, grab a new license or upgrade your existing license to get a v3 license upgrade for free. Need more information? Take a look at the Alfred 3 announcement post for more details.

This week, Alfred celebrates his 6th birthday. While eating birthday cake is always exciting, it's with even greater excitement that we can finally announce that Alfred version 3 is on the way, and we have a great deal for everyone!

The new features and improvements are shaping up beautifully; Vastly more flexible workflows, significantly improved clipboard history and snippets, and a fully overhauled theme editor, amongst the many changes you'll see.

There are also numerous improvements under the hood, ensuring Alfred runs even more smoothly as you work.

Workflows

Workflows have evolved to be much more flexible, allowing you to lay out and connect objects in any way you like. We’ve added object chaining, connection filters, multi-objects selection for moving, copying and pasting, query text processing, and enhancements to many of the existing workflow objects, along with some great new ones too.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be dedicating more posts and videos to introducing these new workflow features, so that you can make the most of them without a single line of code.

Theming

The new intuitive theme editor makes it much quicker and easier to create themes, with per-theme blur settings, better control over spacing and borders, user-defined fonts and easier theme sharing.

Clipboard and Snippets

The new clipboard history brings multimedia content; text, images and files. The overhauled snippets editor adds snippet collections, importing/exporting of snippet collections for easy sharing and direct access to the snippets viewer via its own hotkey.

And much, much more...

These features just scratch the surface of the wonderful changes you'll see in this new release. Version 3 will be even better and more customisable to fit the way you use your Mac, and to make you more productive than ever.

We'll be releasing more information and new sneak peeks over the coming weeks, so be sure to follow us on Twitter at @alfredapp and sign up to our newsletter (at the bottom of our website or in Alfred's General preferences).

Get Ready for Version 3

Get your hands on a great deal ahead of the version 3 release:

• New to the Powerpack? Buy a license now and get a free upgrade to v3.

• Bought recently? If you purchased a license in 2016, you'll also get a free upgrade to v3!

• Got a v2 license bought before 2016? You get a great deal too! Transform your Single User license into a Mega Supporter by simply paying the difference, and get a lifetime of free upgrades!

Note: If you bought a pre-2016 Family license, don't worry, you'll also get a great upgrade deal once Alfred v3 is released.

Thank you so much for being part of the Alfred community over the past few years, and here's to many more happy years of productivity. :)

Cheers,
Vero & Andrew

Note: While this promotion is now over, you can still upgrade to v2 or buy a new v2 license and get a free upgrade to version 3 when it becomes available!

Over the past six years, Alfred has made millions of people more productive on their Mac.

Today is Alfred's birthday, and this week, we're offering you a 10% discount (This promotion is now over) on the Powerpack! We'll be celebrating all week with giveaways and exciting news, so stay tuned.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter at @alfredapp, and sign up to our newsletter in-app or in our website footer if you don't want to miss anything this week.

Grab your Powerpack license by Friday 4th March, 2016, to take advantage of the birthday discount - We're applying the discount to all new purchases at checkout, so no need for codes.

Don't forget to share the love with your friends, so that they can boost their productivity too! :)

Yesterday, we released Alfred 2.8.2, which includes improvements to Alfred's integration with the 1Password password manager, as well as general improvements to Alfred.

You can update to 2.8.2 from Alfred's Update preferences or by downloading it directly from alfredapp.com.

In line with 1Password 6's release yesterday, Alfred 2.8.2 brings a few compatibility improvements to make the two apps work together even more smoothly than before.

Additionally, if a 1Password bookmark is missing the http:// or https:// at the beginning of the URL, Alfred will complete it to allow your default web browser to launch the bookmark.

And finally, we now show the 1Password data path in Alfred's advanced preferences when discovering data automatically, which makes it easier to identify which library Alfred is using.

We've also fixed a few bugs and made a few more improvements within Alfred itself; You can see the full release notes in the change log.

Got a friend or family member who's new to Mac? If you've been looking for an introduction to Alfred, this is the perfect Alfred 101 Guide to get you started!

Each step below is short and simple, with a link to more details on our support site so you can dig a little deeper when you find features you're curious about.

First, why use Alfred?

Usually, when using your Mac, you'll find yourself switching from keyboard to mouse, back and forth, in order to launch applications and websites, or find a file nested in some subfolder of your Documents.

Alfred is your clever helper, waiting in your menu bar for you to call him up without lifting a finger off the keyboard. Using a hotkey, you can bring up the Alfred input window and tell him what you're looking for; an app on your Mac, a web search online or a system command like ejecting a drive. He'll then speedily locate it for you, saving you the manual labour.

How do I launch Alfred?

You'll see the bowler hat in your menu bar at the top of your screen. To summon Alfred, the default hotkey is Alt + Space, but you can change it if you wish.

How do I search my Mac?

There are a few ways to get started, depending on what you want to do:

1. Launch an application

Easy peasy! Pop up Alfred and type the name of the application you want to launch. Keep typing until the app comes to the top of the list, or use the arrows on your keyboard to pick it. Press return to launch the application you selected.

2. Finding a document or image

As there are many more files and images on your Mac than applications, Alfred searches for these in a slightly different way, which ensures that the files don't clutter your search for apps.

To open a file, type "open" followed by the name of your file. You'll see all the relevant results, and you may need to scroll down if there are a lot of results - Just use the arrows to keep navigating down the list. Press Enter to launch your file.

You can also press the spacebar for the same action as the "open" keyword. It's quicker and shorter.

There are two other useful keywords; "find" will reveal the file in Finder instead of launching it and "in" will let you search for the content of files, such as text in a document.

Learn more about File Search.

How can I search the web?

Now that you've mastered searching on your Mac, it's time to try searching the web.

A little tip before you start

Under Alfred's General preferences, you can specify your geographical location; This will help Alfred present you with the most relevant version of a website, such as your local Google results.

1. Use Alfred's default web searches

We've included a wide range of popular web searches - Google, Wikipedia, Maps and many more - to help you find what you want quickly. To see the full list of default web searches and their respective keywords, take a look at Alfred's Features > Web Search preferences.

To use a default web search, simply type the keyword for it followed by your search term. Alfred will launch your default web browser with the results page for the search term you entered.

For example, I can search the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) by using its keyword followed by my search term:

2. Create your own custom searches

Beyond the default searches we've provided you with, you can learn to create your very own custom searches for websites you use regularly. In our example, I created a useful custom search for the Pinterest website.

Fallback searches are so convenient!

By now, you've probably noticed what happens when you type a search term in Alfred and there are no local results; Alfred shows you a few fallback searches, so that you can just hit the Return key and launch a web search.

The default fallback searches are Google, Wikipedia and Amazon, which are popular web searches. However, Powerpack users can customise these to use any combination of web searches, custom searches and workflows.

I've opted for DuckDuckGo as my first fallback search, followed by the OS X Dictionary app, IMDb and Wikipedia. What are your favourite fallback searches?

Learn how to customise Alfred's fallback searches to give you the results you want.

Discover more of Alfred's features, as well as the Powerpack, and boost your daily productivity!