Over the years there been many application launchers for Mac OS X. The most popular one being quicksilver, quicksilver is no longer maintained and I found myself not using it much as I found it just to complicated.
Enter Alfred a new launcher released in the last two months, I’ve been waiting to write a review untill I was sure it was a useful application. It is so here’s my review.
Style
First this app looks great, it’s interface is slick, simple and perfectly mac like. Pressing the hot key of your choosing will make a text box appear at the center of your screen. As you type your search the options will appear below with a hot key to select the right command
What can it do
So the interface is great but what can you do with it. At it’s present state it allows you to
- Open an application by typing the application name
- Open a file by using the open command
- Perorm a math calcultion
- Run an internet search which is the default option if it does not find an application match or file match
What Can’t It Do
There’s still a lot it can’t do but thats expected from such a new application. What Alfred does do it does flawlessly. The Alfred team insist that iTunes integration. Also according to there Twitter feed my must wanted feature running a terminal command from Alfred is coming. So a few more version iterations and i believe it will be everything i want from an application launcher. Go ahead and download it and try it out.
8 bit scraps has been created by Graham Hadgraft a web developer from Ipswich. Graham Hadgraft has 10 Years programming experience in various languages.