Gadgetory

so in any given moment I'm doing a million things in my computer I've got 50 windows open and a ton of apps and I need to move on to the next thing luckily there's an app that helps me do that it's called Alfred it lets you launch apps search Google and do a whole lot of other stuff really quickly so Alfred is just an app for the Mac it's in the App Store or you can pay for it from the developer directly and it's just a text box so it's a lot like spotlight you launch it with a key command and you start typing it's a lot like apps that used to exist for the Mac like Quicksilver launch bar so typically if you want to launch an app you've got to go down to your dock or you've got to open up your Applications folder and if you're like me you've got a ton of applications they're kind of hard to find but without ffred you can just launch the text box type in the name of the application hit enter and you're done same thing with Google searches with a browser you've got a tab over the browser you've got to put the mouse up over to the search box gonna click it then you've got to do your search but without ffred you just get the hot key launched the text box and type of the thing you want to search for hit enter and you're done I mean one of my favorite things about Alfred is you don't have to think about what app you want to use necessarily if you want to search on beat you can start typing IMDB if you want to launch an app you just launch an app it's based on actions instead of apps so for example I know I've got an email sitting in my gmail inbox and I've got Albert hooked up to my gmail so instead of opening Gmail and then going to the search box I just start typing this thing that I want and then one of the options that drops down is to search Gmail for that thing searching all those different default web stores is great but I work on the web and I work at a specific website I work on the merge and so I've set up a whole bunch of custom searches that just work on the verge so for example if I want to search for a tag on the verge I can just open up Alfred I type CT which is how I set it up and I can search for a tag like Motorola and it will automatically show me everything from Motorola verge so beyond just typing text into a box Alfred actually has a ton of other features and I don't use them all but one that I'm really fond of is a clipboard history it automatically keeps record of everything that you put into the clipboard and then paste it and you can call that up with a quick keyboard combo so another part of the keyboard history is its thing called snippets which lets you save lots and lots of different text and call them up later and so for example I've got a whole bunch of gifts that I save and so I can very quickly type in a bias and I've got a thing for bias or I could very type in gtfo and I've got a gtfo together which is great so once you've gotten used to doing all this stuff with Alfred you want to go even faster and you can set up hotkeys to do some of these actions automatically so I have a hotkey set up to automatically bring the clipboard history I've got a hotkey set up to clear out a folder that I clear out on a regular basis instead of actually typing in the thing that I want to do in Alfred I just hit a certain key combo and have things automatically happen so there's actually a small developer community around Alfred that's created a whole bunch of added functionality basically like little apps that attach to it so I use it to do things like automatically create calendar entries with fantastical or to-do lists restarting my audio when it gets broken I've got Apple scripts for to-do lists and a whole bunch of other stuff it's actually pretty great so the thing about Alfred is can be really complex there's a ton of features and I don't even use all but the nice thing is you don't actually have to use all of them you just start with some simple google searches and launching some apps and get that into your workflow and then once you do you can see if you want to start using the other stuff there's been studies that it might not actually be that much faster but the point is that it feels faster and it feels more powerful than just you know moving my mouse around in the Alpha preferences there's a tab that lets you see your usage and it tells me that I launched at an average of 40 times a day which is pretty amazing and it feels like it's more it's such an integral part of my workflow that I couldn't using Mac without it