Since the release, Alfred received numerous accolades, including the revered Macworld Editor’s Choice Award. As a Mac user since the late 80′s, I remember thumbing through my grandfather’s Macworld magazines so being recognised as an “exceptional Mac product” by this mainstay of the Mac industry is an honour. Plus, it comes with a gigantic statue. Who doesn’t love a giant statue?

Additionally, a few other publications awarded Alfred recognition as they looked back at 2011:

• TUAW readers’ vote as Best Mac Utility of 2011
• Mac AppStorm‘s Top Mac Apps of 2011
• The Next Web‘s Top 10 Productivity Apps of 2011
• Cult of Mac‘s Best Mac App of 2011
• Apfelklatsch‘s Best Mac App of 2011

In addition, at the end of the year, screencaster extraordinaire Don McAllister produced two excellent videos on Alfred’s core and Powerpack features. If you’re trying to convince a friend to switch to Alfred, this video will walk them through in superbly useful detail.

With these being the cherry on top of our 2011, Christmas was spent sitting on cloud nine and feeling that we truly do have the best community in the world.

Since 2012 started, Alfred also received a mention on Forbes and a PCMag Editor’s Choice review. As they say, start the year as you mean to go on! We’ve saved as many of the mentions as possible in our Delicious account, so have a browse if you’re curious. And of course, thanks to everyone who wrote these wonderful pieces.

What now?

Did you really think that now that Alfred has hit 1.0, we’d stop improving this app we love so much? Of course not – you know us too well!

Andrew has nearly finished working on version 1.1. As he explains on his Tumblr, it originally was intended to be a 1.0.1 maintenance release, with a few tiny fixes, but it has grown into a full blown release with shiny new features. Expect to see improvements to Contacts integration and Extensions, and see the change log for the full list of changes. As it went into development release today, we hope to roll it out to everyone within the next few weeks.

We also can’t wait to unveil the other ideas we’ve been working on, which we hope to share with you over the course of the year. Until then, keep an eye on Twitter for sneak previews over the coming months!

Cheers,
Vero

Not only have we made tons of new friends, learned loads more about business, but we have been awarded incredible recognition; We were graced with a Macworld’s Editor’s Choice Award, as TUAW’s Best Mac Utility of 2011, one of MacLife’s Top 10 Must-Have Apps of 2011, one of Mashable’s 10 Best Mac Apps of 2011 and have been nominated for MacStories and Cult of Mac‘s awards, to be announced soon.

To each and every one of you, thank you for the support you’ve given us. Even if all you’ve done is told one friend about Alfred, you’ve helped one more person become more efficient when using their Mac. Thank you for the supportive tweets, the hilarious cat and cheeseburger pictures you’ve emailed us and the sock-blowingly brilliant extensions you’ve taken the time to create.

We wish you a relaxing, fun-filled Christmas, complete with great friends and great food. It’s a chance to take a break from the everyday, look back onto last year and look forward to the new year ahead.

2011 rocked and we’re coming back for seconds. Roll on 2012!

Cheers,

Andrew & Vero

We don’t want to cut into your last minute shopping time so we’ve kept it simple once again. As 2011 has been a really amazing year for us, and hopefully for you too, tell us what was the highlight of your year – This can be anything from getting a new job to winning the lottery, or maybe even getting engaged to your loved one! We’ll pick the winners at random and post them before Christmas day!

The few simple rules:

• The Powerpack can be for you or for a friend (aren’t you a generous one!) and will be a single user license or an upgrade from single to mega supporter (for existing Powerpack owners);
• If you’re not interested in the stickers and brushes, say so in your comment as it will give those who want goodies mailed to them more chances of winning;
• We’ll ship the Alfred goodies anywhere the postman goes, so there are no geographical restrictions;
• We’ll send all the goodies in early January so provide a valid email address here and, if you win, get back to us with your postal address by then.

You have until the end of the day on 22nd December to participate (Giveaway closed! See winners list below) so close your eyes, think of what made 2011 most awesome for you, then post your entry. Feel free to use a glass of rum eggnog as a form of creative inspiration.

The winners are:

Powerpacks:

• Paul
• Tim D
• Yohannes Wijaya
• Juan Carlos Orozco
• Andrew MB

Alfred goodies:

• Naoko
• Kevin W
• Mike Earley
• Pavel G
• Tim Jennings
• Farthen
• Jeff J
• ‘Ley Missailidis
• Adam B
• James G

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who participated!

The greatest thing we all have to be grateful for is our health, which gives us the freedom to do what we want and live the life we want. We can now live longer and healthier than ever before. However, cancer is a vicious illness which can affect our loved ones much too easily. My cousin suffered from leukaemia in her teens but came out healthy and strong, and MacStories‘ Viticci is fighting his own battle, as he shared recently.

Unfortunately, there is still much we don’t understand about cancer and some, like Steve Jobs, don’t necessarily win their fight.

We will be donating £1000 to Cancer Research UK this Christmas, hoping that together we can make a difference.

Dropbox is an incredibly useful cloud-based file synching service, which we love and highly recommend for Powerpack users who want to sync their Alfred settings.

To participate, leave a comment below and tell us how you use Dropbox today. Tomorrow, we’ll randomly pick three winners, who will be contacted by email. (Make sure you use a valid email address so that we can get in touch.)

Winners:

Thank you to the 555 commenters (yes, that’s five hundred and fifty five!) who participated in this giveaway. We closed our eyes, took a spin and picked three winners at random. They are:

• Mark B
• Brad
• HankBott

Fear not, Alfred’s here to help. Set up a few custom searches for your favourite shopping sites or just use the handy built-in Amazon web search to find gifts quickly. Let Alfred help you get your shopping done quickly, so that you can start relaxing early with a glass of mulled wine.

Custom searches for shopping

We know you have your favourite stores. So why not set up a few custom searches to get quick search results?

Click on any of the custom searches below to import them to Alfred on your own Mac:

• Search the Apple Store (US) (keyword ‘apple’)
• Search ThinkGeek (keyword ‘tgeek’)
• Search Firebox (UK) (keyword ‘firebox’)
• Search Threadless tshirts (keyword ‘thread’)

A quick way to search Amazon

Let’s face it – all of these custom searches are superfluous. When inspiration (or panic) hits, odds are you’ll turn to Alfred’s default Amazon web search for a quick purchase. The quickest way to do this is to pop up Alfred and type “amazon black socks”. And that’s dad’s sorted for another year!

Your favourite shopping sites

Please share your favourite shopping sites in the comments of this blog post. Note that we have found the old-school http://tinyurl.com/ a reliable way of shortening custom search links exported from Alfred.

Happy shopping – and don’t forget the wrapping paper!

Cheers,
Andrew and Vero

Check for updates in Alfred’s preferences to download it now. You may notice that your update arrives even quicker than usual, as we now use Cachefly‘s content delivery network to distribute Alfred at dizzying speeds.

New features

In this release, the Powerpack gets a few new features. We’ve vastly improved Global Hotkeys, allowing you to launch apps, extensions, files and more quicker than ever with a key combo!

URL History is a new and incredibly handy feature; Type a URL once in Alfred and he’ll remember it for next time. Save these URLs for as long as you need and manage which ones Alfred remembers within the preferences. As with Clipboard History, you’ll need to activate it to start using it, as Alfred respects your privacy.

There’s much more too: Snippets now allow you to sort and search your collection of clips, preferences have been tidied up and Alfred has been made even faster. Have a look at the change log for the full list of features, improvements and bug fixes.

Grab the Powerpack today

You have a few days left to get the Powerpack at the discounted price of £12 before the 1.0 price of £15 kicks in, so grab it now to get the best value! Don’t forget that if you want a lifetime of Alfred updates, you can also get the Mega Supporter license.

Last month, we set up a new payment process to make it completely fuss-free for you to grab the Powerpack using either debit/credit card or PayPal.

The free version has been submitted to the Mac App Store and will become available as soon as it’s approved by Apple. If you were waiting for the Powerpack to hit the Mac App Store, have a look at this blog post for why you might want to wait no longer and get it from our website.

What’s next?

To everyone who has helped us get this far by spreading the word about Alfred, we thank you. It’s been an exciting ride so far, and we’re loving every moment. We still have some great features up our sleeve for Alfred’s 1.x updates. We are also planning on developing more great Mac apps to make your life easier. *cheeky grin*

Cheers,
Vero

The Mac App Store and Sandboxing

The Mac App Store is currently in transition. From March 2012, all new submissions / updates need to be sandboxed.

Sandboxing is a way of protecting users from malicious or naughty software by severely restricting the access an application has to underlying resources. It also makes the app approval process easier for Apple as sandboxed apps simply cannot do things outside their own resources. While this works remarkably well on iOS (I am personally happy to be in the “walled garden” on my phone), it really changes the landscape for OS X applications.

As you know, Alfred isn’t a self-contained application like a game, graphics package or todo list. Many of the things Alfred does are to do with OS X itself… he searches, navigates and opens files and apps on your Mac, he runs AppleScript to interact with other applications, he even allows you to create and run lower-level shell or AppleScript extensions… he is basically your quick interface into the heart of OS X. This is where Alfred starts to throw his toys out of the [sand]box.

I would LOVE Alfred’s Powerpack in the Mac App Store

Having the Powerpack in the Mac App Store would not only bring me more revenue, but it’s also a trusted discovery channel for new users – I *know* Alfred would have significantly more Powerpack users by selling through this channel.

Alfred has always used safe, public APIs and been extremely well behaved. Nevertheless, sandboxing means that many of the “OS X allowed” Powerpack features mentioned above would need to be limited or removed if I wanted to continue selling through the Mac App Store from and after March 2012.

Therefore, the Powerpack won’t be going in the Mac App Store [quite yet]

Alfred’s users are most important in this decision. I want to do the best thing for users rather than maximising the money I could get from the Powerpack. As such, I will be keeping the Powerpack out of the Mac App Store until the shortcomings of sandboxing are fully understood and I can make a full evaluation of wether this suits Alfred or not.

ULTIMATELY: The scenario I want to avoid…

If the Powerpack went into the Mac App Store for v1.0 at the end of this month (which I could very well do) and then in March 2012, the Mac App Store sandboxing policy is strongly enforced, I would be unable to provide further updates through the Mac App Store without significantly changing or removing features which do not comply with the sandboxing policy.

I *WOULD NOT* want to provide an update to users that removes features which people are already using and enjoying just to get the latest version into the Mac App Store. This is a problem which may plague current apps in the Mac App Store as well as Alfred, and it wouldn’t be fair on anybody.

But what if you want the Powerpack?

Just remember, the Mac App Store is one of many ways to buy software for your Mac, and the sandbox restrictions only affect software sold / bought through the Mac App Store. Your freedom as a consumer still remains!

To make things easier for Alfred users, I have recently changed Alfred Powerpack’s payment process to use our own bespoke system based on the excellent Foxycart. You no longer need to sign up for Google Checkout to buy the Powerpack as we now accept Credit / Debit cards and PayPal directly. Foxycart is also heavily PCI and Safe Harbor compliant and we do not store credit card information, which means you can buy with the utmost confidence.

I do hope that the sandboxing guidelines are relaxed or that at least Apple provides further mechanisms to interact with OS X before March as I would love to use the Mac App Store as another way to bring the Powerpack to Alfred’s users.

Version 1.0 is just around the corner

This being said, Alfred is just about to hit 1.0, an extremely exciting time for me! He is better than ever and this is just the start of great things to come for him. Take a look at the change log to see what’s coming or, for the more adventurous, why not download the development version to have a play and help us test it

Also remember that buying the Powerpack now will save you some dosh as he is only £12 until v1.0 is released!

Cheers,
Andrew

Opinions about Google Checkout were very divided; Some of you liked it but many felt Google knew enough about them already without handing their card details over. I handled numerous PayPal transactions manually; not great as the manual license creation meant there was a delay, and if I’ve learned anything about Alfred users is that you’re keen to play with Powerpack features as soon as you can!

After much research and investigation, we opted for the excellent Foxy Cart platform to handle the checkout process. The lovely Zaharenia did a great job of making your checkout experience as pleasant experience by prettying it all up!

As a result, buying the Powerpack is now a smoother and simpler process, with debit/credit card or PayPal option, as you prefer. Best of all, no need to dig around online for your license code, it’ll arrive straight to your inbox, wearing its bowler hat proudly.

If you’ve yet to buy your own copy of the Powerpack, why not grab it now? Do give us a shout when you’ve made your purchase as we’d love your feedback.

Cheers,
Vero

We published the first few extensions in August to give you a taster for what could be done with extensions. Powerpack users have since created over 100 extensions so we’ve added a whole new section to our new support site to show off the best extensions.

The new support site

In preparation for version 1.0 and Alfred being all grown up, we’ve created a new support site. On it you will find:

• Numerous Tutorials on the many features of Alfred
• A growing Knowledge base with answers to questions you have been asking
• The much awaited Extensions repository
• New forms to report a bug or suggest a feature
• And finally, for new users and to convince your friends to use Alfred, a tour of Alfred and a comparison of features between Spotlight, Alfred’s free version and the Powerpack.

Huge thanks go out to Wikidot for the platform itself and to Bryce from Roaring Apps for suggesting it early on. Also, Zaharenia, who has done a great job wrestling Wikidot into the design you’re seeing today.

Submitting your own extensions

As so many great extensions are being sent our way, I wrote a little guide to submitting an extension. By following 3 simple steps, you’ll help us make the most of the Extensions section of the site and we’ll be able to give you credit for your creation.

Note: If you’re one of the early birds who created a script we’ve already listed, please help us by adding the information in the guide above to your extension’s page.

Finally, we can’t say it enough – thank you so much for your energy and support. We love seeing the extensions, custom themes, custom searches and everyday uses you’ve found for Alfred, so keep tweeting us and telling your friends about Alfred. You make every day of work much more fun!

Peace, love and bowler hats,
Vero