How You Use Alfred: Mattias Arrelid, Spotify's Director of SDK

In this series, we are taking a look at how some users have adopted Alfred in their workplace. They'll give us a glimpse of how they use Alfred, how they stay productive and what it's like working for some of the companies we know and love.

Here, Mattias Arrelid, Director of the Spotify SDK, shares how he uses Alfred while working on the latest version of Spotify - a service that fuels us with music every day while we work!

Who are you, and what keeps you busy?

My name is Mattias Arrelid, and I'm on a (never-ending) journey to make Spotify infrastructure better™ across all our supported platforms. Lately, this has manifested itself in some much needed tightening of our build & release infrastructure empowering our mobile & desktop apps, as well as some mentoring for one of my teams who is replacing the beating heart that is our player interface that all our features (radio, search etc.) use to play things inside our apps. Exciting times!

On my desk, an Aeropress and some coffee, gloves (yes, this is Sweden), a MacBook Pro Retina 13" (which may just be replaced this month) and a Cinema Display.

How long have you been using Alfred?

That's one fine, albeit tricky, question right there. Looking through my archived e-mails, I see the first newsletter from you in late February 2011. That said, I was obviously a cheapskate until late 2012 - that's when I bought the Powerpack. To compensate, I opted in for the Mega Supporter option once I gave you my money...

What aspects of Alfred make your workday more productive?

The workflows, period. Being a big fan of Quartz Composer and scripting in general, it feels pretty damn amazing to have almost limitless functionality at the tip of your fingers at a cost that's close to zero in terms of setup and complexity.

I don't even want to think about how much time people spend repeating dull operations in their everyday work-life, when they could be using workflows instead.

Are there any workflows you've created or imported that you'd recommend?

Since I'm always running the latest and greatest internal Spotify builds, I've constructed a small set of workflows that easily lets me perform common debugging operations. One is starting Spotify with a certain cache and/or username - this has proven itself very valuable when it comes to error reporting, since you always want to prove your bug on a clean install of the app/version combo in question. Combine this with another little script that parses the Info.plist to pick up the version number and place it in the clipboard - I don't even want to know how many times I've used this when reporting/confirming bugs in Jira...

Another workflow I've been tinkering around with is one that allows me to easily message/call people using my iPhone. I guess Continuity wasn't that bad after all, especially combined with the powers of app URIs (that lets you invoke iMessage/Facetime with your contact's details). I know something similar is available publicly already, but I wanted more granularity in what operation to perform (like FaceTime with or without video).

Another gem that I can't live without is the IMDb workflow. I love their database, and this workflow gives me the option to just bypass their not-so-nice search box and find the right movie directly from within Alfred itself.

Thanks for answering our questions, Mattias. May Spotify continue to fill our ears with great tunes (and weird back-catalogue tunes too) every day as we work and play!

Want to make your team productive too with the Powerpack? Take a look at our corporate licensing scheme and drop us a line to find out more.