AppFlow

A while ago, as part of the three-part ‘keeping mac awesome‘ tutorial, I reviewed several options for searching your mac.  One that particularly caught my eye was Google QSB.  This allows you to search both your computer and the internet from one box, but is slow and clunky in comparison to Spotlight.

Surely there is an alternative out there! One that will search the computer and the internet easily, and not annoy you as it does.  Enter Alfred.

First Impressions

My first impression of Alfred, when the search box first appears was ‘Wow, it’s big!’.  Big it is!  The search box is far larger than Google QSB or Spotlight.  It almost looks unprofessional at first glance, but don’t let first impressions sway your judgement of this app!  It’s still got a lot to show off!

Applications

The feature of Alfred that your most likely to use is, let’s face it, getting to your apps.  You want to be able to summon Alfred, type as few characters as possible, and get into the application you were intending to get to.  Quick as possible.

When you type a search into Alfred it gives you a list of results, pressing ‘enter’ takes you to the top result, nothing new here.  What Alfred does do, which is very neat, is to number each result and allow you to go directly to it by pressing ⌘ and the number.  This saves a lot of scrolling up and down with arrow keys!

Documents

Unlike QSB and Spotlight, Alfred does not show your files and folders as part of a regular search.  Instead you have to type ‘find’ followed by your search term when looking for a file/folder.

The main disadvantage of this is that it could slow down your searching, however it does mean that folders with the same name as apps don’t sneak into searches for Applications.

The Web

Like QSB, Alfred can be used to search the web.  I have been very impressed by the number of search engines that Alfred supports, including Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Ebay and many more.  If you know what your searching for, this is a very useful tool for getting to that page as quickly as possible.

It’s also really simple to search different search engines as they are prioritised to the top of the search list by default.  This means to search ‘Google Maps’, you can get away with pressing ‘m’, ‘enter’ and your search term.  Very quick!

Conclusion

Alfred is a very good application for getting to your applications, document and web resources quickly.  It’s not as old as QSB meaning it’s likely still learning, but it’s still a force to be reckoned with!

Alfred is completely free, and a very worthy addition to your mac.