The new release brings a brand new feature - Clipboard History - as well as several marked improvements to features that have already been aiding your productivity. Alfred 0.7.2 will make you faster than ever, helping you reclaim all those lost minutes that you spent trying to re-discover information you had saved to your clipboard just minutes ago. Not anymore!

New: Clipboard History

• Text-based storage of items copied to the clipboard
• Hotkey access and quickly searchable history
• Paste selected history item directly into current app from Alfred
• Persistent (including reboot) for a user-defined amount of time (24h/1w/1m)
• Easy-to-clear history which ignores user-defined apps (e.g. 1Password & Keychain)

Learn more about using Clipboard History with the Powerpack.

Improved: File System Navigation

New functionality includes:

• show last browsed path in File System Navigation
• show Result Actions panel for selected item in Finder
• the behaviour of Tab has been changed to auto-complete
• the Result Actions hotkey is now the right arrow, ctrl or fn (not Tab)
• new actions, including Open folder in Terminal.app, Show package contents for applications, Copy path to clipboard

Improved: iTunes Mini Player

• ability to 'Play all songs by Artist'
• Improved 'random' algorithm for random albums
• Overhaul database structure to improve efficiency and performnce
• Show Alfred core if using hotkey from iTunes mini player instead of hiding Alfred
• Toggle to turn off Alfred using its own Playlist when selecting songs

For a complete list of what's new in 0.7.2, 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.

It was inevitable - after Apple's success with the iOS App Store, they would want to get their finger in the pie for OS X Apps too. Is Alfred (and its Powerpack) suitable for the App Store? These are my very initial thoughts about the App Store split into Pros, Cons and Uncertains.

The Pros

Improved reach and visibility: With the positive feedback we get about Alfred, I would hope that we would be listed in the popular and Top Apps in the App store, even if it was only in the Productivity section. If so, this could be absolutely fantastic for Alfred as the visibility would go from reasonably small to millions of users overnight!

Easier purchase / installation process: Apple's installation process has always been a bit broken. I know this as I had to explain it to my mother recently. Allowing people to single-click to purchase / install Alfred and instantly activate it is definitely a positive. Over the past month, I have been working hard to change our checkout process to make it much easier for all users but it still won't be as easy as the App Store will make it. This work may now be shelved.

The Cons

The review process: This shouldn't cause a problem for Alfred as it is 100% 64 bit Obj C / Cocoa / Carbon and after a quick read of the T&Cs, Alfred would satisfy every requirement. However it may make us stumble in the future as it has done already with some legitimate apps in the current iOS App Store - I am a touch wary of this for now.

Fast Release Cycle and Pre Releases: I love doing fast release cycles and dev builds for our users. It gives them a sense of being involved in the development process, learning the App as it grows and feeling instantly comfortable when there are releases. The App Store would abstract the users from the process as they would only be getting the released versions. I could still do pre-releases from our own site but this would be a massive pain for the users as they would have to use two separate update processes for Alfred.

The user doesn't get a tangible License Key: They are locked to downloading and 'owning' the software through Apple. While this may not be a problem, it adds a level of dependency to Apple which I hope isn't going to become a problem for the customer beyond 10.7 Lion.

The Uncertains

The 30% Cut: While this works for simple apps which can be impulse buys and small $1 apps which subsequently require no customer support, I'm concerned that the App Store will drive the value of desktop apps down into this model. If it does, then we simply couldn't continue the near-instant and thorough support that we currently pride ourselves by. We love our users and we can see that they love our feedback - I don't want this to change.

Unable to provide support in The App Store ratings / reviews: So many times on the App Store I have seen people publish negative feedback and 1 star ratings because they don't understand the software. On Twitter, this can be rectified in a second and convert a frustrated customer into a happy customer in seconds.

Unanswered Questions

• Current Powerpack users: Can they be migrated to the App Store update process for free? If we did go to the App Store, we want these users to get the benefit of the easy update process but without an additional cost.
• Family packs and Mega Supporters: Can we still separate the purchase types? Apple has a family pack for iLife / iWork so I am assuming that this will be possible.
• Will the App Store be in all our target market countries? Otherwise we will have to have a separate checkout / licensing / deployment process anyway.
• No support for Leopard deployment: What does this mean for our Leopard users? Will we need a separate deployment process for these users?

In Conclusion

As you may have gathered from Twitter and the way that we interact with our community - our users are the main focus and we want to do the very best for them.

On the one hand I would prefer to keep Alfred completely independent, improve our checkout and update process and keep the sense of community that we have built since initial release in March 2010. On the other hand, I am worried that if Alfred doesn't go into the App Store, it will be forgotten about or dwarfed by alternatives.

I would be very interested in hearing your views on this.

Cheers,
Andrew (@preppeller)

I love interacting with our Twitter followers, giving them sneak peeks of things I am working on for Alfred at that particular moment in time. Screenshots of upcoming features, keeping the change log up-to-date, discussing future ideas. However, this poses a bit of a problem.

Alfred is under heavy development and currently releases very regularly with pre-releases every 2 to 3 weeks and a general beta release every 4 to 5 weeks... Even so, posting these tidbits brings a response that I would liken to when I was younger, gently and methodically prodding the back of my dad's seat on a car journey...

While I absolutely LOVE the enthusiasm from the users for Alfred's development, creating and releasing native software isn't an easy thing. Just because a screenshot looks complete doesn't mean it's ready for everybody to use. The UI may not even be wired up or functional, or it may have quirky or missing behaviour, resulting in software that does not yet work properly.

I pride myself on the quality and stability of my releases so I simply will not release something until I am entirely happy that YOU, our fantastic users, will also be happy with it... I re-learnt this lesson 100 times over by releasing the iTunes mini player too early. I spent more time supporting this unfinished feature by email than I did trying to improve it for the 0.7.1 release.

Think of the software release cycle as baking a cake. You put some ingredients in, you mix them up, maybe add a few additional ingredients that weren't in the recipe to make the cake extra special and then you start baking. After spending all this effort making the cake, the last thing you want to do is take it out of the oven too early and ruin it.

With that in mind, just remember that I have big plans for Alfred, and even BIGGER plans for the Powerpack. Be patient and don't make me get the cake out too early, as it will be oh so much more delicious when it's ready. :)

Cheers,
Andrew (@preppeller)

We've just released the latest update to Alfred, making it (hopefully) even more helpful to you. The big changes have taken place in Alfred's iTunes integration so let's have a look at just how much you can now control your music experience only using the keyboard.

Within the Powerpack's iTunes Mini Player you now can:

• browse your music collection by Genre, Artist or Album, navigating as you would within iTunes itself
• play music from a Playlist (currently only basic functionality but we'll be working hard to make it better in future releases)
• play a Random Album - depending on how adventurous you're feeling, it can be either truly random or you can play a random album from a certain genre or by a certain artist
• reindex your music library by clicking on the lightning bolt - this is especially useful if you've recently changed or updated your music collection
• use updated shortcuts to get even quicker - the basis for these is always "Alt + Cmd + __". Use down arrow in that space to play/pause a currently playing song, left and right arrows to move to previous and next song, up arrow to play a random album. You can also rate your songs by using "Alt + Cmd + number from 1 to 5".

For a complete list of what's new, you can have a look at the change log.

Like what you're seeing? Our next few releases will focus on user experience improvement rather than completely new features. We'll polish and tidy up the recent features and tweak some of the older, established features. As ever, Alfred is in very active development and there's lots more to come, so hold tight.

It's been a while since I wrote my last post on the blog (Alfred is about to get a whole lot better) and I am over the moon with how much progress I've made with Alfred in the last 6-7 weeks.

Let's just look back to see what has changed on a technical level - under the hood really:

• Completely new architecture to allow for additional views of data, used in the file system navigation, iTunes view and Actions view. This new architecture was designed with plugins in mind so as Alfred matures, Powerpack users will be able to create and use their own plugins sitting on top of Alfred core
• Deeper integration into OS X with cocoa interfaces being built for AppleScript to interact with Finder and iTunes
• Enhanced performance and caching of system metadata with the biggest gains seen in Applications searching
• Full code review of TODO comments, leaving no stone unturned making a number of core level stability improvements

All this while creating the actual Powerpack features, which sit on top of these new architectural changes, and performing extensive Instruments analysis (I'm addicted) to ensure that there are no leaks and no hanging object references.

What does all this mean... well, depending on your Mac spec, Alfred is capable of using under 20Mb of memory when fully active and less than this when idle. It also means that there have been ZERO performance hits by adding in the Powerpack.

This is just the start!

Even though there are many positives, I have to admit that I am not fully happy with the iTunes mini player. Due to my mantra of 'release now, fix later', I released the iTunes mini player before I wanted to. Because of this, it is lacking playlist support, there are quirks when trying to play certain songs, it requires the songs to be OS X indexed, making it temperamental and there is no NAS support yet.

Fear not! This is my main focus for 0.7.1. I am rewriting the core of the iTunes player to use the iTunes library XML instead of the metadata. This not only means that your music will be found regardless of the state of your library, but will also add playlist support and browsing your music without having to search for it! Put it this way, iTunes mini player is going to rock! :)

What next?

I have a number of usability enhacements to make in the coming releases and then will be working on AppleScript plugins, full Address Book integration (viewing your contacts from within Alfred) and starting to work on the native plugin API so that you (and we) can add in amazing third party tools such as 1Password and Evernote.

Powerpack

If you haven't yet picked up the Powerpack, grab a copy now to get on the awesometrain and see the Powerpack as it develops! Remember that buying the Powerpack is what keeps the speed of development up - it means that I don't need to take on other contract work to buy dinner (and food for the kittens!)

Did I say "buy the Powerpack" yet? No, I don't think so... do it! :D

I just want to reiterate how much I appreciate how awesome you, our users, are! The community we have built with over 3000 Twitter followers and a growing Get Satisfaction forum (Our new forum is Alfred Forum) is truly amazing and has been extremely motivating.

Cheers,
Andrew

[Image credit: Michael Dales on Ember]