Alfred then, now and moving forward

September 2, 2010 – 9:57 am

The cake is definitely not a lie

Alfred 0.7 launch party cake

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 is truly amazing and has been extremely motivating.

Cheers,
Andrew (@preppeller)

[Image credit: Michael Dales on Ember]

By Andrew | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)

The Powerpack & 0.7 beta now available

September 1, 2010 – 11:38 am

Following a solid week of testing and tweaking, the Powerpack was released for general availability on Monday. The feedback we received from you has been mindblowingly positive and you seem to be having as much fun using the new features as we are.

For those who missed the details of the 0.7 release, you can find out more on our redesigned website. There, you can still download the core Alfred app for free as well as buy the Powerpack.

To help you find your way around Alfred, our lovely Anna has created a few screencasts.

Bookmark our Vimeo page to see more videos as we record them!

We’re listening: Alfred Forum

Until now, we mostly dealt with support questions either over Twitter, where answering a question in 140 characters was sometimes tricky, or by email.

To help you find answers to your questions when we’ve got our heads down developing new features, and to give us somewhere to answer your questions properly, we launched a Get Satisfaction forum.

There are already some great conversations going, like “What is your favourite custom search in Alfred?”, so what are you waiting for? Join with your Twitter, Google or OpenID. It takes two seconds and you’ll be in good company, we promise!

What’s coming next

What? Did you really think we were going to kick back and relax now?

There are a few small bugs which we’re tackling for 0.7.1, but mainly, we’re looking at further feature improvements. In particular, iTunes will be much improved, with support for playlists and NAS drives (Network Attached Storage, in other words, hard drives on your network but not attached to your computer directly).

We’re also starting to plan 3rd party integrations and the plugin architecture. In the future, this plugin architecture will enable you to write your own plugins for Alfred, extending it to do anything you like.

On that note, we’re putting a call out for a developer who can create a plugin for Alfred to make Hannah a sandwich. ;)

Overall, our users have been brilliant over the recent weeks, providing us with tons of helpful feedback during pre-release and since general availability. A huge thank you to everyone who has helped us spread the word about Alfred – we couldn’t do it without you!

By Vero | Posted in Releases | Leave a Comment

Countdown to Powerpack Launch!

August 18, 2010 – 9:10 am

Five weeks ago, we announced the Powerpack, a set of incredibly powerful features sitting on top of the Alfred core. We’ve been working intensively, putting every spare hour into the planning and development of these exciting features.

We’re now just days away from releasing the pre-release of the Powerpack, ready for our eager users to help us test. But more details on that further down. First, I should introduce the new features, shouldn’t I?

Powerpack features

In this first Powerpack release, you’ll find three major features:

The File System Navigation provides a very easy way to browse files without using the mouse. Using only the keyboard, you’ll be able to quickly skip to the files you need without opening Finder.

Alfred 0.7 Powerpack File System Navigation

The Result Actions brings the ability to work with and perform actions on files anywhere on your computer with just a few simple keystrokes. Open, copy, move or email files with a quick key combo. We’ll add even more actions later on.

Alfred 0.7 Powerpack Result Actions

The iTunes navigation, which is still in development, gives you control over your music collection with a quick search. Browse your songs, albums and artists plus rate songs, all within Alfred. In the future, you will also be able to browse your playlists, genres, radio and much more!

Alfred 0.7 Powerpack iTunes (work in progress)

This is just the beginning

These are just a few of the planned Powerpack features on our road map. We already have plans to improve the three features above along with adding fast access to your Address book, 3rd party tools and web services integration, Clipboard History, improved AppleScript support and more.

Grab the Powerpack early

From Monday 23rd August, you’ll be able to buy the Powerpack to use with the pre-release version of 0.7. (Want to help test the pre-release, I hear you say? Here’s how you can get early access) A week later, or once we’re satisfied of the stability of the release, we will make it general availability.

The Powerpack is great value, priced at only £12 until we get closer to 1.0. That’s cheaper than two cinema tickets (hold the popcorn), than a Moleskine notebook with a cheap pen or than a pizza and a couple of beers.

Future updates marked 0.X and 1.X will be included under this license, so you’ll have many more features to look forward to, as well as feeling good for supporting indie software development!

As previously mentioned, past donators will all receive a license key to thank them for supporting us when Alfred first launched.

New website

Accompanying these new features will be a whole new website look, which we hope you’ll love as much as we do. Our Twitter background gives you a sneak preview of what the new site will look like.

Developing the Powerpack has been quite a ride so far. We’re committed to creating the best productivity tool for Mac you’ll ever use and in a few days, you’ll be able to try it out for yourself.

See you on Monday!

Cheers,
Vero (@vero)

By Vero | Posted in Announcements | Comments (16)

Alfred Is About To Get A Whole Lot Better

July 15, 2010 – 12:43 pm

In the past number of months, Alfred has been my side project and I have managed to squeeze it into every spare moment I have. This includes writing the software, replying to many support emails, being really active on Twitter and listening to quite a considerable amount of feedback and feature requests. Alfred has had tens of thousands of downloads and we estimate that we have thousands of ‘regular’ day to day users, which is amazing considering the software is still in beta and has grown entirely from your word of mouth.

I can tell you now that I have LOVED every moment of it to date – The sense of community has been overwhelming and extremely motivating. It has also been good to see that many of the popular feature requests are in our existing long term road map. In other words, you guys have really helped focus what is important.

The future of Alfred

As we approach 1.0 and the end of beta test period, the sense of community and love has made me think long and hard about the best way to make Alfred sustainable into the long term. It has also made me realise that I didn’t want to just draw a line and take away what people use daily by making 1.0 a paid-only product.

I want to continue to grow the Alfred user base and its evangelists as much as possible, giving people the choice to support future development. I also want to start taking Alfred more seriously rather than it being just a side project. Therefore today, I am excited to tell you about the future of Alfred (I feel like I should be wearing a black polo neck shirt with a keynote presentation up on a big screen).

Announcing the Alfred Powerpack

Alfred Powerpack IconThe Powerpack will be a paid set of incredibly powerful new features sitting on top of the stable and robust core of Alfred.

These features will have the same simplicity, speed and usability of Alfred but have much deeper integration into OS X, allowing you to use Alfred for much more than just launching apps and finding files – ALL from quick keyboard actions.

By offering a paid add-on to Alfred, we can keep the core of Alfred FREE and give the choice to you, our wonderful users, to both support the development of Alfred and get WAY more awesomesauce!

Here is a sneak peek just a few Powerpack features I am currently working on:

  • iTunes mini player / music navigator
  • File system navigation and file operations
  • Much better and faster access to Contacts
  • Much more control over how Alfred looks
  • An integrated AppleScript studio allowing for easy AppleScript addons

The list of features I have planned is actually really rather large and definitely exciting, so you will have to stay tuned. I would also like to make it very clear that the Powerpack will never bloat Alfred or get in the way of people who simply want to use Alfred as a launcher :)

What you can expect in the next few months

  • The Powerpack is still in the works, I am hoping to start giving early access within 6 weeks.
  • In the next release you will most likely see a Powerpack tab in the preferences but won’t be able to use it yet.
  • Ollie (@olliekav) has created a new website – it’s almost ready and it’s gooorgeous!
  • Basically, continue to use and enjoy Alfred!

… Oh, and one more thing

When the Powerpack is first made available, it will have a special pre-release price  to thank you, the early adopters, for saying such great stuff about Alfred: http://twitter.com/alfredapp/favorites

[Update 20th July: The early bird price for Alfred will be £12, available for purchase in a few weeks]

Note: The people who have already donated to Alfred will be getting a license as soon as they are available.

Sign up for updates

Sign up to our newsletter on alfredapp.com or from the About tab of the Alfred preferences to get announcements and newsletters hot off the press! Also, follow @alfredapp to join our growing community :)

Cheers,
Andrew (@preppeller)

By Andrew | Posted in Announcements | Comments (55)

Alfred App 101: Web Searches

July 1, 2010 – 9:44 am

We’re very excited about all the things Alfred can do and the new functions that are being added every day. But sometimes you just want to get started quickly, figure out the basics and launch in. Here’s your chance to do this with a short 101-style guide that will get you set up and searching in no time.

In this post, we’ll cover:

  • Basic web searches
  • Setting your own web searches keywords
  • Alfred’s fallback searches
  • Forcing specific searches

Basic searches

Alfred is great for launching applications on your desktop. But it’s also great for helping you use the Internet much more quickly than if you were to manually click on a browser icon in your dock and only then start typing in your search.

Instead, just launch your Alfred with a simple keyboard shortcut (which you can set up in Preferences > General) and start your search with a specific keyword. If you want to search Google, start with “google” followed by your desired search.

Similarly, you can search specific websites with the use of specific keywords, just as in the examples below:

To find a complete list of the keywords that are currently available, just go to Preferences > Features, and tap Web Searches on the left side to have a look.

Setting keywords

The keywords for your searches are fully customisable. If a different one makes more sense to you, or you’re a speed wizard eager to shorten searching time even more, simply double click on the keyword you wish to change and then type in your new preferred change:

Which will then result in this:

Now you’re all set to be the fastest Internet user around.

Fallback searches

Sometimes, even Alfred gets confused about what you’re asking him to do. In that case, he will try to guess, usually falling back on a number of general searches you might have in mind. Most often he’ll resort to Google or Wikipedia. Admit it, you wanted the help anyway…

Forcing specific searches

Ultimately, however, you are still the master and Alfred is here to serve you. That’s why we’ve added the option to force a search option, no matter what Alfred thinks you’re looking for. To set these up, go to Preferences > General > Results and choose what happens when you hit a certain key combination instead of simple return. In the example below, pressing alt + return will always result in a Google search:

Underneath, I want to search for the word “Dropbox” on the Internet/locally/etc. and not actually open the application. I’d therefore simply type in the word and hit alt + return, which would then perform a general web search for me.

This wraps up the first Alfred guide. Many more coming soon.

By Anna | Posted in Tips and Tricks | Comments (3)

Release 0.6.4 Beta: More Speed & Sparkle

June 21, 2010 – 2:35 pm

We’ve been working tirelessly on the latest few versions of Alfred, adding plenty of new functionality for your enjoyment.

View the full change log for all new features and fixes since 0.6, but here are some highlights:

  • The Sparkle update framework has been integrated for painless updating
  • New System Commands: Type “sleep”, “shutdown”, “screen saver”, “logout”, “restart”, “empty trash” for quick actions
  • Completely overhauled preferences: Find and tweak Alfred preferences easily
  • Basic “Play” feature to launch music tracks in your favourite music player
  • Improved URL & character encoding to improve support for non-English users
  • Increased Alfred speed significantly (by ~365% according to our tests!), further reducing CPU load
  • Added Appsfire as a default search, enabling you to search for apps directly from Alfred

As we have completely rejigged the preferences section, this Alfred update will reset your preferences to default, so you’ll need to choose your hotkey and location again. It does not affect your custom sites, however.

This is just the beginning, as we’ve got much more exciting stuff lined up for the next few months.

Quick tip: If you’re here, you’re probably a curious tinkerer, right? You can help us test Alfred pre-releases before they go out to the public by ticking the pre-releases box in the General > Updates tab within the preferences section.

Alfred pre-release checkbox

By Vero | Posted in Releases | Comments (6)

Release 0.6 Beta Now Available

April 28, 2010 – 2:48 pm

Last night, we released the 0.6 beta which you can now download from the homepage.

A lot of work has gone into 0.6, from adding new features to optimising what’s already there for speed and efficiency. In summary, here are some of the key changes:

  • Custom searches: Add your own sites to search with Alfred
  • Optional fuzzy matching on Applications (eg. “thl” would find The Hit List)
  • Rewritten word matching and relevancy parsing for efficiency, notably reducing CPU usage
  • Improved default search scopes
  • Assign ctrl, alt, cmd + enter to action search results
  • New web searches & locales added
  • Hotkey improvements including double-tapping Cmd

As usual, the full list of changes is available on the change log.

We’ve come a long way, baby

Over Twitter, here on the blog and in person, we often get asked “When will Alfred do X? When will this feature be added?” We love hearing your suggestions – along with our development roadmap, they help us shape the future of Alfred and work out which features you really want. It isn’t always easy prioritising features, but we hope you’re liking the direction the app is taking to date.

For a bit of perspective on how much has changed since the first release – a mere two months ago – here is a screenshot of the preferences when Alfred first came out on 28th February 2010.

In Alfred 0.4 beta, there were only 3 preferences: Setting your hotkey, choosing from a limited number of locales and a colour theme. We find it hard to believe how much the app has changed and the community grown in little more than 8 weeks!

As we continue to develop Alfred, one of the biggest challenges will be to balance new features requests with the simplicity that makes Alfred unique.

PPC version

We have released an unsupported PowerPC version of Alfred. For PPC users who choose to download it, we recommend turning off the update checker (under General > Updates), as this tracks the Intel version of the app.

We cannot guarantee the stability of this version but first reports point to it being fully functional so, if you’re a PPC user, welcome to Alfred!

By Vero | Posted in Releases | Comments (9)

Release 0.5.6 Beta: Alfred Five Weeks On

April 5, 2010 – 8:15 pm

It’s now just over a month since we first launched Alfred. The first thing we’d like to say is a huge thank you to the +13,000 people who have downloaded Alfred, tested it, reviewed it, commented about it on Twitter or otherwise helped spread the word.

Today, we are releasing version 0.5.6 beta, the fourth public release to date. It’s full of new features and improvements, as the lengthy change log shows since 0.5 two weeks ago.

A few highlights:

  • Performance: Pre-caching of apps & significant speed improvements
  • Basic update checker which pops up “Update available” message
  • Improved local search scope preferences
  • Improved relevancy and accuracy of results (This is just the start, there’s still a lot to do here)
  • Bit.ly shortcut creation (using “bitly” keyword)
  • UI design tweaks
  • Added new countries to locales
  • Advanced calculator (using ‘=’, still experimental)

The full change log is available here for the curious ones.

Email signup no longer required

When we first launched Alfred, we didn’t include a way to check for updates. For that reason, we required users to sign up with an email address so that we could email everyone with updates. As a result of adding an automatic update checker, we’re able to make email sign up optional.

We’ll be sharing news and tips on Twitter and via our newsletter, so be sure to sign up if you want to stay in touch.

What’s Next?

In the next release, we’ll be focusing on further improving relevancy of searches as well as adding/improving web searches. We have dozens of tickets lined up, taking into account nearly all of the feedback we’ve received from users in the past few weeks.

We’ll be slowing the pace down ever so slightly as we’ve been spending every spare hour on Alfred recently and need to catch our breath before tackling the next release.

In summary, we’ve loved every moment of developing Alfred and these past few weeks have reinforced our plans to continue developing great Mac software for the years to come.

Get the latest version on http://alfredapp.com, have a play and let us know on Twitter how you’re finding it!

By Vero | Posted in Releases | Comments (21)

Alfred 0.5 Change Log

March 21, 2010 – 12:57 pm

[Note: See the Change log in the Help section for the full detailed change log updates]

Version 0.5 Release Notes

New features:

  • Dictionary “Spell” and “Define”
  • Basic calculator
  • Google’s I’m feeling lucky added with keyword “lucky” (this will be improved in the future)
  • Wolfram Alpha added to the standard web searchers with keyword “wolfram”
  • Google translation added with keyword “translate” – Translates both sentences and websites
  • Added Flickr search with keyword “flickr”
  • Added Ask.com with keyword “ask”
  • Spotlight Comments – you can set a comment of “ff” for Firefox and Alfred will find it

Preferences:

  • Improved hotkey selection field
  • Ability to change keywords for web searches
  • Ability to disable unwanted websites from results
  • Option to prioritise items with Spotlight Comments at the top
  • Preference to save window position
  • Option to always show subtext under results if available
  • Preference to turn off Alfred fade-in
  • Added a “Reindex” button to the experimental tab
  • Ability to configure the “Esc” key behaviour
  • Ability to disable “find” and “open” keywords
  • Experimental feature to allow a comma as decimal separator (for locales such as Germany)
  • Experimental feature to ignore the locale for Google and Wikipedia
  • Option to choose how many results are shown
  • Option to remove text at bottom of window

Improvements:

  • Tweaks to the dark theme
  • Correctly URL encode a + as %2b (which means things like Google calculator will now work)
  • Locale system overhauled (need to re-set your locale)
  • Remove the status bar icon before quitting so it doesn’t leave a gap
  • Special characters now shown correctly in hotkey field

Known issues:

  • Iconography not updated in prefs due to time constraints
  • Search relevance needs further improvements (main focus of next release)
  • Help pages need to be populated in more details
  • Spotlight Comments don’t get prioritised above standard searches (eg. Spell…)

Known bugs:

  • eBay URLs are incorrect
  • Ampersand not encoded
  • Address book: If launching a contact and there is a search in the contacts search field, the contact doesn’t show
  • Window positioning not remembered on first change, but remembered from 2nd move
By Vero | Posted in Change Log | Comments Off

Alfred App beta: Looking back at the first week

March 7, 2010 – 12:47 pm

Today is Sunday, 7th March. It’s been a week since Alfred was first released out to beta users, and version 0.4.1 goes out today. To be honest, it’s hard to believe it’s only been a week!

Last Sunday evening, after a stretch of solid development, we decided to put Alfred out there, planning to have a nice quiet beta, sharing it with our immediate Twitter followers and Mac-using friends.

We should have foreseen it: Putting a beta invite on Twitter is like announcing a house party on Facebook. If it looks any good, everyone will want it and you’ll turn around and have 100 people in your swimming pool! Thankfully, everyone was very polite and nobody threw the TV into the pool. (Phew…)

As a result of that quiet-beta-on-steroids, we received more useful feedback in the first week than we could’ve dreamed of. Over the past few days, we built on top of the first release to include many of the smaller preferences/functionality that you requested;

  • More locations have been added.
  • A smaller, less intrusive hat for the menu bar & the ability to hide it altogether
  • Custom key combinations to open Alfred
  • Added System Preferences Panels to default search (eg. “Appearance”)

You can view the full change log here

The fancier features and advanced preferences will be added over the coming months, so please be patient with us as we integrate new ideas.

Haven’t downloaded Alfred yet? What are you waiting for!? Get Alfred App by signing up at http://alfredapp.com!

By Vero | Posted in Releases | Comments (18)