Our Xmas Calendar has come to an end, tips and treats have been shared and now it's time to sit back and enjoy the holiday atmosphere.
2010 has been amazing for us, going from the idea of an app to a fully-featured app that is now nearing version 1.0. We've made so many friends in the Mac world and have had a great time developing Alfred. Looking towards 2011, we can only see things getting better; Alfred will grow up and, who knows, maybe find himself with new siblings? :)
Have a wonderful Christmas day, full of rest and relaxation, and enjoy the last few days of this year.
Joyeux Noël, Veselé Vánoce, Merry Christmas!
Cheers,
Andrew, Véro & Anna
This week, we can't help but feel festive and cheerful. We've been working on bringing you the best treats in our Alfred Xmas Calendar and recently received a treat ourselves when Alfred was featured as one of The Best Mac Software of 2010.
Adding to this, the 0.8 release has been a very strong one; There have been very few reported bugs and feedback from the pre-release users has been fantastic. So we hope you enjoy this pre-Christmas update!
New: Clipboard Snippets
Save your most-used clips as permanent Snippets, and access these through assignable keywords or through the main Clipboard History window. You'll need to enable this Powerpack feature under the Clipboard preferences.
New: 'Eject' command
Under System Commands you can now enable Alfred to 'eject' any mounted drive on your Mac. This is disabled by default so don't forget to go and check the box!
New: Recent documents
You can now show recent documents for your applications. Simply press the right arrow on an app within Alfred and then select the first action "Recent Documents".
New: Customise fallback searches
You can now customise which web searches Alfred offers when he can't find a suitable local result. Go to Preferences > Features > Fallback Searches. We've added a shortcut to help you work out why Alfred may not be finding a result you were expecting, and both of these features can be hidden by going to the Preferences if you prefer the minimal look.
New: Usage graph
Ever wanted to see just how much you use Alfred? For the stats geeks, we've added in a usage tab and a quick way to share your Alfred statistics with all your friends.
For a complete list of what's new in 0.8, have a look at our updated changelog.
With so many features, don't forget to check out all that the the Alfred Powerpack can do. And remember that it's not too late to look at the Christmas Calendar tips and tricks to become an Alfred power user!
The time has come. You've tweeted your love many times, you've told just about everyone you know, and now you can finally put the words into a visual image and let people know. You're a proud Alfred user. To celebrate, show your colours with some luscious purple and teal Alfred backgrounds, available for Mac, iPad as well as iPhone backgrounds.
As 0.8 draws closer to being ready (1st dev release likely within the next week), I thought I would go over some of the motivations behind this release and give a bit of a sneak peek at some features between now and 1.0.
The focus of the 0.8 Release
Initially, 0.8 was supposed to primarily be just a "quality" release, improving usability of all the current features and trying to remove as many outstanding bugs as possible. Any long term user of Alfred will know that this is not how I like to work ;) so naturally, I have added a number of new features too.
Almost 100 improvements and minor bug fixes including:
- Overhaul of the knowledge / result sorting making the results much more predictable
- The fuzzy matching option for Applications now works as expected
- Instant pasting from the Clipboard History (using low level system events); also change hotkeys to return for paste and cmd+c to copy item back to Clipboard
- Define keyword now shows a preview of the word definition in Alfred itself
- Better URL detection when typing just a URL directly into Alfred (e.g. alfredapp.com)
- Added a number of new locales and better keyboard / language support
- A detailed performance and memory analysis, Alfred is even faster and lower memory!
... and many many more things!
The following NEW features have been added:
- Persistent Clipboard Snippets with assignable keyword
- Ability to select the fallback web searches (e.g. use Bing instead of Google)
- Usage graph for the stats nerds (ahem... me)
- Eject command to eject any mounted drive (USB, DVD, dmg, etc)
...and maybe some more stuff if I finish it this weekend ;)
And then what?
The list of things I want to add before we hit the big 1.0 milestone is way too large to post in here. I need to reassure you that I am fully aware of feature bloat and am absolutely committed to only adding features when they will not introduce bloat or complexity of any kind to Alfred :)
With that in mind, here are just a few of the major Powerpack features which will be part of Alfred between now and 1.x:
- Significantly improved bookmark support (both browser and online)
- Full Address Book and iCal integration
- Plugin architecture allowing for users to introduce their own results into Alfred
- Integration with a few of our (and your) favourite 3rd party applications
- Improved hotkey support, i.e. assigning a hotkey to Applications
- Shell integration (run shell commands from inside Alfred)
- Improvements to the file system navigation and actions
It's just a (beta) label
One final note: Alfred has been labelled as a beta for probably too long. The reason I have kept the label is because I am still actively developing it and like people to know that it is not finished yet. It has become apparent over the last few months that some people may perceive beta products differently to this, so from the next release we will be dropping the beta label.
All this means is that Alfred is now (and has been for quite a while) high enough quality to be considered a released product.
Before people ask, we will keep the 'early-bird' price of £12 for the Powerpack for a little longer while we are adding more features, but buy now to avoid disappointment! :)
Cheers,
Andrew (@preppeller)
In the most recent 0.7.2 update, I started a process of usability enhancements in the run up to 1.0 to try and make the Alfred experience more predictable and consistent for new users. It's only during this process that you realise how very few options there are for fast 'single tap' hotkeys to perform certain tasks.
Tab Auto Complete
One of the very hardest changes I made was to the Tab behaviour - something which absolutely had to be done as Tab is synonymous with auto completion. Before I start, I will explain how Tab auto complete works in the Alfred file system navigation view and how efficient it makes finding a file you want.
If I have a photo called 'kittens15.jpg' in a folder called 'Aww Kitties' on my Desktop, I would use the following process to navigate to the file after bringing up Alfred:
- ~ takes me to my home folder
- de [enter] results filtered to 'Desktop', enter the folder
- aw [enter] results filtered to 'Aww Kitties', enter the folder
- k [tab] auto complete to 'kittens'
- 15 [tab] auto complete to 'kittens15.jpg'
Clearly having Tab as Auto Complete freakin' rocks... so what now?
Brain Dump Alert!
Warning: The following is a bit of a brain dump of some of the thoughts I had for changing the Tab behaviour.
1. Tab needs to be Auto Complete, nothing else
As you can action files in both the default Alfred default view and the file system view, the tab behaviour has to be consistent between these views. This rules out having Tab to perform an action completely.
2. The action key needs to be easy to find without looking
By making the action key ctrl or fn it will always be the bottom left key on the keyboard. This is very easy to find with your left pinky without taking your eyes away from the screen.
3. If you like scrolling, group all the action key with the arrows
By allowing the right arrow key to action, this means that you can find the file you want to action, then for example press right, down (to select open with), right, down (to select the application), then Enter to finalise the action. As an added bonus, on Apple laptops, this also makes the action key the bottom right key of the keyboard.
So there we have it
The Tab behaviour now rocks, and the action key is easy to find without having to look for it. But wait, there is one more thing... If you liked using Tab just because of the location on the keyboard, you have another option!
Remapping Caps Lock
If you don't use Caps Lock (I'm guessing you probably don't), in the OS X Keyboard preferences, you can select 'modifier keys' and remap Caps Lock to Ctrl which then works as the action key! Some have mentioned that this is the most comfortable key to find on the keyboard so everyone's a winner! :D
Cheers,
Andrew (@preppeller)
