796: The Alfred Field Guide
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Hello and welcome back to MacPowerUsers. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined by my friend and yours, also the man of the hour, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, Stephen. How are you today? You're always the man of my hour, David. You too, buddy. You too.

But, you know, sometimes we usually share what we're working on with each other. But you have been like quiet in our text thread the last several weeks. And I was like, oh, I know what you're doing. You're getting a field guide ready. Yeah. Alfred Field Guide. It lives. So awesome. It lives. So awesome.

So that's we're going to get into that day. We're talking about Alfred, what you can do with it. You know, I think it's I think it's basically kind of known like it's in the category of like app launchers. But like the like its competitors, Alfred can do so many things. So we're going to talk about some workflows, some automation stuff. But first, I'd love to hear a little bit about the field guide itself.

Yeah. You know, it kind of grew out of my use of Alfred. Like all the field guides are apps that I'm, I'm passionate about, but I am very fast on my keyboard on my Mac. And it's because of Alfred, you know, I've got all these cool workflows and things plugged into it. And,

Like occasionally people look over my shoulder and they're like, wait, what did you just do? And like for me, the idea of sending an attached email or something like that is something where I would never touch a mouse because I've got Alfred kind of wired up. And it's just those comments I get from people over the years saying, how did you do that? And also just the realization when I get a new Mac, how slow I am until I get Alfred wound in. That's it. You know, I need to share this. So like six months ago, I took...

Alfred off of my computer and built it up from scratch as I recorded the videos. And it was rough because I'm like, I've got so much of it wired in that like,

waiting until I could record the video to add this workflow or that workflow it slowed me down yeah but the the benefit is I've got a really cool soup to nuts coverage of Alfred um it's 80 plus videos we've got a couple we're finishing up as we record the show I don't want to give a final number I think it's about 83 or so wow and it's about four four and a half hours but

I always get pushback on that cycle. Why would you make four hours on a keyboard launcher? Well, it's, it's a field guide. It covers everything, you know, and you don't have to watch it all. Just watch the parts that, that matter to you. But, but like one of the things I did in this one is I went through just on the Alfred website alone, they had 300 plus workflows and workflows and Alfred are like these really cool plugins. Like you can add features to it and it's,

They're very generous in allowing third parties to add them. So there are everything you can think of. And I went through all of them and some of them are not good. Some of them are kind of dead and some of them are awesome. And I included about 40 of them in the course where I walk you through how to set them up. I taught myself how to build your own workflows and I taught you the basics.

you the customer how to build your own workflow so it's just you know it was a real fun process making this field guide and when i got alfred rebuilt at the end it's even more useful to me because of that journey and i get to share it with you in the alfred field guide

Yeah, and I think this one in particular, it really struck me as I was going through it over the last several days, is that you really can, like, oh, look, I don't use some of these apps. Like, this particular workflow is not interesting to me or pertinent to me. Like, you can sort of bounce around this one, I feel like, a little bit more than some of the others because Alfred is so extensible and...

I was just nodding along as you were talking. I've used Alfred basically since it came out. We're going to talk about some competitors later, but I was using Quicksilver way back in the day, and I moved from Quicksilver to Alfred when it was new because

And my experience is exactly like yours. Like the thought of, of like uninstalling it and building it back up from scratch is a little scary because honestly, I don't even know everything. Like I was, I was looking through my Alfred setup as I was watching the field guide videos. Like, Oh, I forgot that I had even set this up custom because it's just wired into how I work on my Mac. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it gives you a lot of power to do that.

Um, another thing I did in this field guide that was fun was I picked some of my friends who are power users of Alfred and interviewed him. You're one of them. Steven's in it. This is a, you're in the field guide. And it was fun talking to people and learning about like, what are their important workflows and what are the,

things that they do with Alfred. Like one of them I had on is a guy who does all of his snippets with Alfred. Cause you could do that. It's his text expansion tool and like just different angles on the application. But, but the goal of this course really is to give you Alfred superpowers and

It's working. I mean, we, I released it before we recorded to the lab members and I'm getting so much positive feedback on this one. It feels really good, you know, from, you know, a lot of the emails coming out like, Hey, I've been using the app for 10 years. I didn't think I really needed it, but I went ahead and got the course. And now all of a sudden it's like, you know, the afterburners are on and that's, that's what I want for people going through this course to really just kind of to nail it down. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm really proud of it. And so it's called the Alfred Field Guide. You can get it. We'll put a link in the show notes. If you're an MPU listener, you get 10% off for a limited time. MPU Alfred, no space, just MPU Alfred, get yourself 10% off.

I like to do those launch discounts. I like to, you know, it's funny. I talked to a marketing guy. He's like, you got to like charge the maximum when you release it. And I'm like, yeah, but those are the people that support me. Yeah. I want to give them a deal. Yeah. So I do the opposite. I give 10% off at the beginning and then I'll put it back to regular price. The price on this one is $69. So it went up a little bit, but you know, I think it's worth it. I put a lot of effort and hired people and it's not, no,

not a inexpensive process to make one of these, but you know, I actually don't charge that price until after the people that actually support me have a chance to buy it at a, at a discounted price. That's my, uh,

That's my anti-marketing marketing. Yeah. No, I love it. I really respect the way you run all of your business. But this part in particular of like, you know, we got people who really pay attention to what we do and want to support it. And then you got people who are just, you know, will come across this over time. Like, yeah, I think it's right to kind of treat those audiences differently. Yeah. Yeah.

So check it out, everybody. And we're going to talk today about Alfred. We're not going to just sell my guide for the next podcast. But at the end, we will talk a little bit about the production changes because those are kind of work flowy, fun stuff. And I really like I think production wise, this is probably one of the best, if not the best I've ever shipped. And I agree. You always get better at this stuff. And that's always fun. Yeah.

Yeah. In fact, I knew this was coming up because I feel like a few months ago you were like, gang, sometimes I just get clips from Sparks of like, hey, how does this microphone sound? How does this shot look? I'm like, oh, you're setting up for a film guide. Steven is so helpful with that, though, because you know so much about this stuff and you'll give me an honest opinion and I really appreciate it. So, yeah. Of course.

Let's talk some Alfred basics here. The application has been around for a long time. I mean, really 15 years now, launched in 2010 or so, now on version 5. And I think sort of the way I want to frame the basics conversation with you is, why would someone look at a third-party launcher as,

If they're just finding applications, opening applications, searching for files and folders over what Apple has done with spotlight. Well, I think for a lot of people, they wouldn't. I mean, like my wife is the ultimate, like casual user. And like the idea of her trying to use her keyboard to prep and send an email, that's just not going to happen, you know?

And that's the public that Apple serves. But anybody who wants to get more out of it to save time and just make everything more efficient, these launchers are super powerful. Alfred wasn't the first one on the block. Like you said, I think Quicksilver was where I first became kind of aware of making this work. But Alfred has a really good mix.

One of the things in the field that I actually asked the developers if they would do an interview and they agreed to like a written interview. And I got kind of a, and that's in the guide, but it's interesting to hear. They are very conscious of what they're trying to do for people. And the goal of Alfred really is to kind of give wings to people who want to spend a little bit of time figuring out how to, to use some power features. Yeah.

And I think they do a good job of it. And one of the things I like about Alfred is that the model is that the app is free, but then the power pack gives you additional features, but they're not stingy. I mean, the free version of Alfred, if you're listening, you don't need to buy the field guide. You don't want to buy the power pack. We just want to get a launcher. You get quite a bit just downloading the app, no subscription, you know, without paying them a penny. Yeah.

Yeah, it's really... I was kind of reflecting on this, thinking about some of the other applications that have cropped up since then. Alfred really is still using kind of an older school model, and...

you know, it's so key to my work. Like I would be fine paying a subscription to them, but in their current model that I've done is I've, I've just bought the power pack each time. Like, um, I think actually last time I moved to the lifetime purchase, which we can talk about, but I have always felt that the developers behind Alfred respect their users and,

And really care about the Mac. All of these little features and settings, you can customize it just like any powerful Mac application. And I respect and appreciate that. Yeah. And it's hard to explain the concept of the app for people who haven't used it before. But the main thing is...

You invoke Alfred, like you invoke spotlight, you know, spotlight is command space by default. I actually command space for me is Alfred. Same. And then, and then off you go, right? You know, you can do a lot of things, you know, and we're going to talk in the show about what all that means. Like just a simple example, before we recorded today, I realized that my, my battery is dying on my keyboard.

And if I invoke Alfred command space and I just type BTB with his Bluetooth battery, it just gives me my battery report on the screen. And that's because I use a workflow that does that for me. It's just, it's a dumb little thing.

But it's so much easier than going to settings and keyboard and looking at the, you know, battery status or buying a separate app or, you know, all the things that you do to get the battery status of your keyboard with Alfred. It's just install a workflow and type BTB, three letters. You got it, you know, and just imagine that magnified across everything.

all of your Mac, you know. One of the fun things with people that got the early access to the guide is just hearing back, you know, minute reports like, wow, you know, I'm actually finishing work earlier and I didn't realize how much time I'm saving with a keyboard launcher. But, you know, depending on what you do, it can really make a difference. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's for a long time I have

been a big believer in like, I want to touch my, my mouse or trackpad as little as possible. And this is one of those tools that just lets you keep your hands where they were. Um, and yeah,

We're going to get into the workflow stuff, but so much of it is so powerful. And you mentioned actually one of my favorites, the old BTB is how I consider it too. Like, oh, like what's my keyboard doing? You know, I can just, I can just type at any moment and see.

Do you speak Oliver? Yeah, I do. BTB. Yeah. Yeah. I think that means something else. Don't Google it. You know, I don't even know. And don't, don't bring me. I'm not positive, but I'm young enough to think that maybe it does.

But old enough to not know for sure. I'm old enough not even to realize that I just stepped on a landmine. My foot is off and I didn't even realize it. But yeah, so Alfred, it's a great app. And it's like I said, it's a solid player. Developers very much dedicated to the Mac and making it great in a way that makes sense. And it just seemed like the right app to cover because it's so valuable to me.

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It's used by 165,000 businesses, and that's for a reason. To learn more, go check it out at 1password.com slash MPU to get your 20% off and let them know you heard about it here on the Mac Power Users. So let's get into some of the core features of Alfred. Being a launcher, being a search tool, I feel like kind of stage one of this is, hey, I just want to open an app without using my dock or launchpad or something.

Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing spotlight does. Alfred does a little better. It pays attention to your logic. Like for instance, OmniFocus for me forever has been OF forever.

But that's not how the word is spelled, you know? So some of the launchers don't find it when you type OF, but Alfred does. It uses fuzzy logic. And it has a memory over what you select. So like if you type OF for OmniFocus and it's number four on the list, but you mouse down or hit command four to select it, the next time you type OF, it's going to say, oh, when he says OF, he wants OmniFocus. So

You do that, you know, a thousand times over using the app and suddenly the app just really is custom to your preferences. Yeah.

So you don't have to try and think, well, what does the app want me to write to launch an app? It's just like, what do I think to launch an app and just go with it and you're in. So that's really, that's, that's beneficial, but, and that you get that with the free version. So it's a nice upgrade to spotlight in that sense. But I think really the, one of the parts that people miss out on is files and folders. Like Alfred is excellent to get you to a file and folder. And so many people, um,

Waste so much time opening a finder window, drilling down with the mouse, trying to get it. Then like you, you click on the wrong one and it opens the wrong one. Alfred just gets all of that out of the way with the file and folder search stuff. The fuzzy search and learning kind of what I meant is one of those things that

again, I hadn't thought about it a long time, but as soon as I came across it in the field, I was like, oh yeah. And like, so I have this numbers document I open every week for something at relay and I just type CO and it remembers it. Cause like the word collections is in the file name. It's not even the first word in the file name, but it has learned that when, Hey, when the user types this, this is what he wants and it, it adapts to you and learns over time. And again,

it really speeds things up. Yeah, totally. And, and that's what you want, right? You want a launcher that kind of learns the way your brain thinks and just, and just performs based on that. And, and this app is so, so good for that. It's just like getting to a certain folder, getting to a specific file, opening an app. That's really what it's all about. And when you get into the power pack features, you can actually do a lot more. You can leverage that

But just for the free version, just getting it to do that, I think is pretty useful. Yeah, I think so too. So that is one area that it is more like Spotlight, right? Spotlight does those things too. Spotlight, I think, does the fuzzy search and it can look inside the contents of a document, that sort of thing, which is very helpful. Sometimes you can't remember what your document's called, but it's like, oh, I wrote about this thing.

But one area where it starts to stand apart from Spotlight is the idea of default results. And Apple has some of this in Spotlight now, but not at all, I think, as comprehensive as what Alfred has. So when you go into its settings...

There's a whole bunch of things you can do around the types of things it can search, where it can search. Do I want to search by tags or not? Do I want to open a document or find a document? Could you walk us through some of those things?

Yeah, the default results window is in the settings. It's in the free version too. And this is where you get to really kind of dial it in. And the trick with any one of these launcher applications is you want, you know, the idea is you have a thought, you want to push a couple buttons on your keyboard and have the computer do the thing, right? And so you need the option for whatever the thing is.

But you don't want a bunch of other options. Like you don't want the thing to be number 13 on a list. You want it to be number one or two. And so the balance you have to walk with an app like this is figuring out how to get it to find the thing without giving you a lot of other things. And that is where Alfred kind of really steps up because they give you this thing or this screen where you can say, look, I don't want you to ever show me

Text files when I search because I have a lot of text files, I don't want them to show up or images or documents or Apple scripts or just show me Apple scripts and contacts, but no text files. I mean, there's a large variety of options you have.

Not only that, it also says, okay, and these are the folders I want you to look into to find the things, but not the other folders. So you can really dial in the scope of what it's looking for so you get the thing without making it number 13 on the list. And that's something you have to kind of learn with the application, but it's powerful.

It really is. One of my favorite things to search, favorite's a weird word. One of the things I search a lot in Alfred is contacts. So I can start, I get main space, start typing someone's name, and it will not only find someone's name in my contacts, but it'll

Alfred can also show you information, right? So I can hit the return key and now I'm looking at your email addresses, your phone number, your address, your birthday, and I can use the arrow keys and like copy into that data out or hit command L to like see your number really big. If I want to, if I want to call it, it's, it's not only that I can point it as certain, certain types of data. It's that can also make that data useful in the context of Alfred itself. Yeah.

Another thing you can do in that screen when you have a contact up, if you hit command O, it opens it up in the address book. And that is by far the fastest way to get to somebody's contact card. I've never found a faster way. It's like opening the address book. I feel like.

It's like, I feel like I've been dipped in molasses every time I open that application because it's like, it's so hard to get. It's like, type it in. It's under this thing. You got to scroll down. It's like, it's no fun. But just open Alfred, type, you know, hack it.

return, commando, and you're into the address book entry. So stuff like that is super useful. And actually, that drove me nuts while I was recording the guide because I turned contact search off. I didn't want all my friends' phone numbers to pop up every time I did a search for the field guide.

But man, I realized how much I use that because I was constantly, you know, I did. I turn it back on when I wasn't recording. Then I'd record in the first video, you know, Hackett's, you know, social security number would come up. Wait, hang on. Hang on. Is that floating around in your address book? No, I just, it's making that really.

But either way, you know, it was, it was silly, but the, you know, weird screencaster stories, I guess, but yeah, but it does give you very granular control over that stuff. And, and I think that's one of the things that kind of sets the app apart.

I mean, just going in here, like things that I have turned off, like I don't want to see emails in my Alfred search. That is not useful to me at all, having a bajillion emails saved on my Mac. So you can really customize it to what you want. Yeah. And that's really the goal with this app, I think, is to find your little happy place and take advantage of it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So you get a bunch of stuff with Alfred free. But I really think if you're going to use Alfred, just get the PowerPack. Number one is you want to support the development of the application. That's how you do it. And as a selfish user, you get a ton of additional features. And it's, I think, an easy purchase. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And we mentioned the business model earlier, but you can purchase it as a single license for like the current version. So the version five power pack is 34 pounds, but free lifetime upgrades for a single user or 50 is 59 pounds. And, and,

There's not, I mean, there's not a ton of Mac productivity applications with a 15-year track record like Alfred. And so the free lifetime upgrades is a heck of a deal because this thing is not going anywhere. And it is, I mean, it's been a real stalwart of the Mac ecosystem for a long time. Yeah.

So what do you get when you buy into the Power Pack? Well, you just get more power, you know, and you get a lot more useful features. Universal Actions is one of them.

And this is one I think a lot of people who just like buy Alfred and start using it miss. But what it allows you to do is take anything you've selected, an app or a file or whatever, and perform actions on it right from the Alfred window. Like an example for an application would be recent documents. Like if you...

If you use numbers and you invoke the universal actions, the first entry will always be recent documents. So let's say you don't have it remembering the name of that spreadsheet, but you opened it recently. You invoke numbers, you hit the universal action button, and then go to recent documents, and you've got a list of the 10 most recent documents you opened.

And it just gets you there, you know, with a file, it might be file actions, like move it somewhere, save it, copy it, attach it to an email, things like that. But one of the big aha moments for a lot of people going through the course is like nailing down universal actions and realizing just how little they need the finder now. And I love when I hear that. One of the things that I do all the time with universal actions is to, um,

look at the folder in Alfred. So if I type the name of a folder and I hit the right arrow, I can then navigate through that folder again without ever opening Finder.

And this is useful for me in particular, because like right now we're recording, right? I have a finder window with two tabs open. One is where my local recording is saved from audio hijack. And the second tab is the folder where we sync our audio. So Jim, our editor has access to it. Right. And if I needed to like scramble and look something up as we're recording, um,

I would inevitably like mess that finder window up and then like have to go back to it. And I kind of use like open finder windows or even minimized finder windows as placeholders for like a project I'm working on at a time. And so being able to use universal actions and navigate a folder that

And it's subfolders and documents from Alfred lets me preserve my working space and be able to kind of jump in and out of other things quickly. And again, it's just something that's ingrained in me now where I can just like blast through some folders and find her and like find exactly what I'm looking for or move it or copy it and not disrupt whatever else I was doing.

Yeah, the universal actions empower that. The feature set depends on the type of file or object that you have selected. One of the things you can do with universal actions a lot of people don't realize is you can invoke that outside of Alfred. So like if you've got a file on your desktop and you just invoke the universal action keyboard shortcut,

then it gives you the dropdown and the ability to move, attach, do whatever with that file from the desktop. So that's another piece of this I think a lot of people don't even realize exists is Alfred, while it's primarily lies under the command space or option space, whatever the triggers you use for it, it also exists outside of that, at least these universal actions do.

Do you find yourself with universal actions in particular, customizing what they are? You've got several things you can do here. You can turn on and off default actions here.

There's also the action ordering. So I have that enabled where it sorts actions by the last used. And so if I'm looking at an application, the universal actions are sorted by what are the last universal actions you used when looking at an application versus a folder or file? Because I tend to use the same ones kind of over and over, but I don't want to turn the others off because I may want them at a given time. So have you customized yours in any?

I leave that off that checkbox because I feel like for me, it's more kind of a spatial awareness that I know where it is. I don't want to have to read through the list. That makes sense. And the ones I want are usually at the top anyway, so I don't need to reorder them. But that's a good example of Alfred. It's very flexible. So it's got that logic in there, the fuzzy logic that it can apply kind of anywhere. And they do give you the option to use or not use it. And

You know, it's just like with spaces, you know how by default Apple puts the spaces where it puts the most recent one next to where you're at. Yeah. But in my head, if that was mail a minute ago and now it's, you know, Safari, I like what just happened. Who moved my spaces? And so I don't like that stuff. I like to turn that stuff off, but you've got the option either way. Yeah. And yeah.

That's funny because I absolutely abhor that spaces option, but it's exactly what I want. Alfred, I don't know what that says, but that's cool. Customization, baby. It's the name of the game today. Yeah. Another way that you can customize your experience on your Mac with Alfred is with web search. Yes. Uh, so it's got a bunch of built, built in web searches in there. So like, let's say you like to look at YouTube images, I'm sorry, Google images. And, um,

You can have it in there where you just type the key phrase. I think it's Google images or something like that, but I just type IMG and it's learned that whenever I type that, I want to search Google images. And like, let's say I'm looking for baseball PNG transparent. I want to drop an image of a baseball on a presentation. You know, I'll just type Alfred PNG.

IMG baseball transparent. And then it just goes and search Google images and finds one for me. And like, that's a type of search I do all the time. YouTube, same thing. YT space, whatever, um, half blind dovetail joint or whatever, you know, is exciting to me. And it goes and finds videos on that topic for me. And I don't ever use like the YouTube search bar or go and like

mouse my way in Safari to Google images like an animal. I just do all that stuff through Alfred. My, one of my things I use absolutely all the time is to create custom ones. And so I have a custom one that searches the Apple knowledge base. So I can like, Hey, I need to find out everything. Apple has published about the iPod hi-fi. And I can like,

I do space KB because that's the shortcut I've set up for it. And then I can type whatever I'm looking for. And on the back end in Alfred's preferences, that's just set up as a search. And you have you give it like the root URL and then you tell it, hey, this is where this is where I want you to put whatever I typed into that URL and it sends it out.

And it's really great. I've got ones that I've built for searching the Wayback Machine and the Wayback both search and by URL. Again, things that I do just all the time. Yeah, I even have one for Max Markey because did I write about this before? I mean, I've been writing it since 2007. There's a lot of stuff there. Another one is I can't seem to quit Kaggy, K-A-G-I, the alternative search engine.

I mean, I spent $10 a month for a search engine. That's so stupid, but it's so good. I like it. And I don't drink Starbucks, so don't come at me. But either way, I built my own custom Kagi search engine in Alfred, so I can always just go to my preferred search engine and search from there. Yeah. It has this weird effect of searching your computer and searching the web. That being the same interface to start is really compelling to me.

And especially if I'm like in the flow of writing something or doing show notes, like I don't have to go over to my browser and then go to Google or, you know, whatever search engine I'm using. Like I can just do it again in the flow of whatever I'm already doing. Yeah. Yeah.

And once you get them under your fingers, it's so second nature. That's the part where people start to look, watch you and say, what did you just do? You know, because you get to information so quickly and think about this. You, you do like a, a search. It finds the text you need. You select the text and then you invoke the universal action and copy it as plain text. And then you invoke drafts and you paste it. And like all of that happened on your keyboard.

using alfred and you never lifted your fingers and you got exactly what you needed very quickly and that that's the kind of things you get when you start like mastering these types of utilities i want to talk about the clipboard history tools okay because we did years ago we did a clipboard manager roundup looking at a bunch of different

different applications. And Alfred, for me, has been my clipboard manager for a long time. I tried a bunch of those apps and some of them stuck around for a while after that episode. But I ended up going back to Alfred because, again, I'm using it for everything else. And like everything else in Alfred, you have a lot of options around your clipboard history. So you can say, hey, just keep plain text or keep images or file list. You can set how long to keep it.

You can go in here and do like the advanced section to like, Hey, um,

ignore these applications or do I want it to automatically paste this? If I hit return it, it is really powerful and I can sit command space and I do CB and I get a list of like the last, you know, however many things that I've copied and pasted. And so when I'm, especially when I'm writing for five, 12 pixels, I will go like, if I'm going to link to something someone has written, um,

I'll copy their name. I'll copy their URL. I'll copy the block quote. And then I'm not like bouncing back and forth between the article and my blog post. I can then use Alfred to very quickly paste all those things in and get to the part that I'm going to add to it. It's,

Clipboard Managers, man, it's great. And instead of having another application doing that, having it in Alfred and having its Clipboard Manager be so good, I'd be broken without it. I keep saying that this episode, but I really mean it. This is another one of those things that without it, my computer is not as useful to me. Yeah, and the thing about these features, so they have a bunch of features in this application, like Clipboard History, that you can buy independent apps for.

But I think Alfred, they do a very good job with all of these features. That's one of the benefits of it being a mature application is they put the time in. One of the things I really appreciate about Alfred clipboard history is the search. Like I've got a bunch of stuff in my clipboard history. I was working on something yesterday. I had some HTML code in it. I don't see it anywhere now, but I just typed HTML and just gave me the exact entry I was looking for.

And that, that is a benefit. Like it's clipboard history is great. Like a lot of them show you the last five or whatever, but this allows you to just have this running tally depending on how you set it up and to search it. And then you search it, mouse down, hit enter. Again, you just did work on your computer without lifting your fingers off the keyboard. And it can integrate with the universal clipboard. So if you paste something or you copy something like on your iPhone, then you

It's like all integrated with Alfred's thing, which is really awesome. Universal clipboard is great. I use it all the time. And so to have it pulled into the, my clipboard history whirlwind is, is really sweet. And like another feature they have that, you know, there are apps out there you can buy for this as a snippet feature where, you know, you type,

you know, a few keystrokes in your cell phone appears or whatever. In fact, Apple has this built into the system. There's, you know, text expanders and app that we've talked about a lot on the show. They do that. Alfred has its own snippet system that probably lies on the spectrum somewhere between the built in and text expander. But for most people, it's just fine. And

That snippet system goes into the clipboard history search menu. So when I search in the clipboard history, not only do I see clipboard history, I can see snippets that have similar strings in it that I'm searching on. It's just, it all feeds itself really well. Very well thought out system.

So what we've been talking about is really a lot of the stuff, what I call the core features of Alfred, the stuff you kind of get out of the box when you buy the power pack. Some other ones that we don't have time to cover them all today, but there's a music mini player in there that again, it's like, you know, getting an Apple music and starting music that takes a lot of time.

And a lot of mousing where this searches your system, finds your playlist, starts up music, just a couple of keystrokes. It's again, it's a thing I use all the time because I love listening to music in the background. I almost always start it with Alfred.

If you want to run a shell command, you can do that, or a terminal command. That's really nice. They've got the ability to install custom themes so you can change the look of it. And one of the nice things about Alfred is that there's a rich community behind it, so there's always kind of new looks to the application. You can get through it. There's a lot to the core feature set of Alfred.

Yeah, there's so much great stuff in the community in particular. We're going to talk about that with workflows in a second. What I like about the theming in particular is it means that I can make it look how I want, but it also means it doesn't ever really look old. Like my theme has changed over time as sort of the look and feel of the OS has changed. Yeah. And, you know, it's rumored that there's a redesign coming. And I bet you...

Alfred and or the community will have something new for that early on to make it look like the rest of what Mac OS might look like later this year. And it's just it's like it's just fun and it's cool to see how people theme it. And that means if you have, you know, particular needs for color or text size or something like it's all extremely customizable.

And the other thing, sometimes I find myself going the exact opposite direction and look, getting like a theme that looks really old just for nostalgia, you know, and like, like, I don't know, it's fun, but you know, it gives you the ability to, to make those choices. And then, so you've got all these features built into the application, um,

And then several years ago, they announced this new feature called workflows. And workflows are what really bring Alfred to the next level because then with workflows, you can plug into that rich system and there's a bunch of workflows generated by the Alfred team, but there's a bunch of community developed workflows. And that's where it really, that's where this application really takes off. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by NetSuite.

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The guide is free to you at NetSuite, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E, netsuite.com slash M-P-U. So if you do one link from this show, we've got a link in the show notes called the Alfred Workflows Library. And if you just want to get an idea of what you can do with this application, just click that one link and check it out. Because when I started recording the field guide, there was 300 plus on this page, and

And there's always new ones getting added. So this is just a constantly updated set. It's like features you can plug into Alfred. And the workflow architecture is very open.

And one of the things I like is the Alfred team is very open about these workflows. Like there's several Bluetooth management workflows that they didn't just get one from the community and say, okay, no more allowed. You know, if people want to make one that does something slightly different, then they'll let that one in too. So when you decide you want to figure out the best Alfred workflow to manage your Bluetooth stuff,

Well, you can go to my field guide where I've got the two or three that I think are great. But you can also just go through the library and download five of them and pick the one that works for you. And so many of these applications and these workflows work.

cover different problems slightly differently and give you the ability to really customize the experience. I just, I mean, I think ultimately the reason I made this field guide is because I just love the way this workflows community has matured and Alfred has nurtured it to the extent that this application is so much more useful than it ever was before.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I'm just looking through this gallery. I've already found a couple I'm just bookmarking for myself to look at later on. The breadth of these is just absolutely incredible. And the creativity that people have done to create these things. Here, I just found one that converts Roman numerals to decimal or vice versa. I don't know who needs to do that on a regular basis, but if you do...

So someone in the Afro community has you covered. That's pretty cool. Well, it's like, I just found one and I went through all of these called, and this one's called Kagi search. Somebody's made a Kagi work. Well, I built my own, but somebody has done it now. So it's there for me. If I wanted, I could have just used this and, and it's really, it's,

a massively useful tool set. You know, like one of the ones I use that I didn't cover in the field guide because it's so niche. But when you screencast, you want to have the text on the screen look big. So I have to turn my resolution way down when I screencast. And I have one called resolution. And all it does is it changes the resolution from the, you know, the, the nice one I usually have to the big blocky one that I use for screencasts.

And I don't have to go into the control center and mouse or do anything. I just type R E S and then a few right arrows and it returns and it's, it's done. And like, no matter what problem you're trying to solve on your Mac, somebody out in the world has probably written an Alfred workflow to solve it for you. Yeah.

One that I love is called Link Clean. And, you know, you and I both like our currency at work is URLs. And very often you go to a URL and maybe you opened it from an email or social media and has a bunch of tracking stuff on it. And I don't want to include that tracking stuff when I link to it in the show notes or on 512 pixels. And so what this does is I can feed it.

A URL with like a UTM underscore source equals, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just gets rid of all of it. And then puts back on my clipboard, a clean URL without, uh, without any gross stuff. And I use it a billion times a day, I think.

Yeah, and the way that one works is it depends. The basic configurations when I use, it's LC, clean. That's so easy to remember. Just type LC, paste in the URL, hit return, and you've got it. It's so fast. I mean, these things are all written with the idea of kind of keyboard efficiency in mind. And that's what I love about them. Another one, we talked at one point, you talked about the OneThing app years ago, and I love it.

In fact, if you watch the Alfred Field Guide, you'll see it says Alfred Field Guide in the menu bar. You know, I saw that. I was like, I know what you're doing. Yeah, it's just one thing. But there's a one thing Alfred workflow because switching the little text up there requires you to do a bunch of mousing and pressing and clicking. But you just invoke the one thing workflow, type in your phrase and your menu bar updates. And it's like, yes, this is what I like.

Another great one is Alfred search notes app. It's a funny name. It's on GitHub, but you can install it really easily. And what it lets you do is search for titles of notes or create a new note. If nothing is found, if that sounds familiar, it's because it's how a envy alt used to work back in the day. Very, very fast. You can search titles and bodies and folder names and,

And I use it a bunch because, you know, I have a lot of things in notes. I'm up to over 600 things in Apple notes now. And the Apple notes search, I know it's not that many compared to some people and many compared to others. And the note search is fine, but it's kind of fiddly. And being able to just very quickly pull something from Alfred is sweet.

Yeah. And like that one is a, I covered that one in the course because I just think it's, it's so much faster than the built-in system and notes to find something because you'd be sitting on your desktop, you invoke Alfred type in space and type the name of the note and it's going to show up. It goes and hits your database and returns all the results. Then you hit return on the one you want and it opens that note. It's just like the idea of frictionless computing and,

like evolve there. And I love that. I love that workflow. It's one of my favorites.

But, you know, so there's a lot of different like workflows available to you. If you want to just convert units really quickly, that's a good one. Or, you know, date arithmetic, stuff like that. So it's a utility tool, but it's also a launcher tool. It's a finder tool. You know, it really can kind of become what you need of it based on, you know, what you're looking for. And the trick is anytime you find yourself annoyed with how long it takes to do something, you know,

It's just, you know, do a search Alfred workflow. Yes. Insert problem and see what comes up. Yeah. And it's not just like big mainstream applications like taught, which is a text document sort of thing that we've talked about in the past. There's some, someone wrote an Alfred workflow to deal with that. So you can access your dots or copy content or append to it right from Alfred. So it's not just like these big main line, the Omni focuses of the world. It's also, yeah,

smaller, maybe more niche things. And I want to really highlight what you just said. If you find yourself with some friction in your workflow and you're an Alfred user, go look around online because chances are someone may have something that can help you in that situation. And the number just continues to grow over time, like you said earlier. So

It's a very vibrant, compelling community. And that's something that I value in tools that I use every day, right? I like that people are working on ways to make Alfred better, not just the team behind it, but also its community. That means a lot to me. And it means that this app really does kind of get better and better over time. We had a guest on Mac Power Users last October, Stephen Millard. And Stephen...

is one of the biggest contributors to that workflow community. And he's like the unsung hero of this field guide because his name keeps coming up because I keep calling in his workflows. He made a shortcuts workflow that is just killer. I mean, so it allows basically Alfred to become a shortcuts launcher. And there's a couple of these out there. The Alfred team made one as well.

But I really like Stevens because it filters down or it can just show me shortcuts in a certain folder. Or if I type it right, it can give me an Apple script to invoke the shortcut. I mean, he thought of everything and it's all in this great little shortcut launcher called bypass.

And so I cover it in field guide, but then I actually asked Steven to come in and do one of the power user interviews because not only does he write all this cool stuff to make it work better, he's a power user as well. But it's funny to me, kind of the personal stories that come out of the process of making these, because like Steven is like a friend, but he's also a huge contributor to how I use Alfred. Yeah. Yeah. He does some amazing work.

Anyway, a couple others that stood out for me. CleanShot X, you guys got me hooked on that app a year or two ago, and now I can't live without it. But there's so many features in CleanShot X that when I was going through the library of all these available workflows, I saw one for CleanShot X. I'm like, I didn't even know that existed. It wouldn't occur to me to think, well, CleanShot X has a lot of features. It's hard to get to what I want sometimes.

But there's an offered workflow that does everything for you. And it's like, yes, now I use that one daily. A couple of these I did not know when I started the process of making this field guide. And it's kind of fun adding features to this app. Yeah.

The CleanShot one in particular is nice because I use Bartender and CleanShot is hidden for me. And so if I want to go find it, especially if I'm just on my MacBook Pro and like a bunch of stuff is in behind the notch because I don't know, Mac OS hasn't realized there's a notch yet or something. It's like, oh, I can just do it from Alfred. Like I don't need to go find this tool somewhere. I can just do it from my keyboard. Yeah.

And, you know, the beauty of being on a Mac is you actually have a lot of say as a user as to what can happen. Like one of the workflows that I cover is the one password workflow, which is full disclosure, a sponsor of the show. Sure. But I use the app every day and, but it's password data. It's super secret data. So you shouldn't be able to just write a workflow to pull all that stuff out.

In order to get to your one password data, you've got to go in the terminal and do some stuff and they walk you through it. And I walk you through it in the video. It's not that hard, but, but it takes a little time to get it set up. But once you have it set up, it's also kind of my preferred method of getting to my passwords. So just type one P and then, you know, Alfred goes and gets it for me. Mm hmm.

So the workflows are something that is really great and it makes Alfred into a very personal application. So like if you love to invoke emoji, if you use Apple notes, maybe you don't use Apple notes, but you use note plan or whatever. There's somebody has written scripts for this stuff.

And the other piece of this whole workflow story that I realized on the journey of making this field guide is it is not hard to make your own. I thought that this was a thing where you had to be like a Stephen Millard level programmer and to make these, but a lot of this stuff is really simple stuff. And because it supports shortcuts, you can build your own very easily. Like I've been spending a lot of time with reminders and,

And I want, and reminders doesn't have a quick way to access stuff, but I could write shortcuts to open specific reminders lists and this wire that into an Alfred workflow. And I walked through how to do this in the course and I built a reminders launcher in like 15 minutes and it, I use it every day, you know? And it's like, so like the apps that you use that don't even have workflows built to make your own for like a single user,

Once you go through the course or do a little research online, this just is not that hard. I mean, the Alfred team did a really good job of making this stuff accessible to non-engineers. Absolutely. I mean, even going back to the search thing, right? Like it's very easy to build these, the editor for the workflows. It reminds me of something like audio hijack, right? You're kind of dragging boxes out and connecting them and, and

Setting hotkeys or like, oh, pull in an external Apple script here. I want to use a file action over here.

It's really pretty easy to do. And because they're just a file at the end of the day, you can export it and like share it on your own website. I've done that a couple of times over the years of various things that I've built. You can zip it up and send it to somebody. So they're easy to build. They're easy to share. And you can really like see exactly what they're doing. You can click on any of those little, those little nodes in the editor and see what's

exactly what it's doing. And that's, that helps me feel better because some of these things, you know, I didn't build, I'm using other people's and I'd like to go see what they're up to and like, see how they're doing things. And it's, it's all very easy to do. Yeah.

And then another piece of Alfred that I found very useful and I covered it in the guide is just as an automation partner because Alfred, because of its open nature, like if you use shortcuts or Apple script or keyboard maestro, all of that stuff invokes and can be invoked by Alfred.

Which means that it's an excellent automation trigger. So you can trigger a bunch of automation just with the command space. And I think that is probably one of the most useful things for it. Like, I never go in shortcuts to launch a shortcut. I always do it with Alfred. And I can do the same thing with Keyboard Meister scripts and Apple scripts. And that's really handy. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's so cool that you can use it to trigger those things kind of no matter where else they are in your automation system. I mean, even shell scripts, which we touched on a few minutes ago, like for a while I was having trouble with Finder hanging on my machine. This was a few years ago, but Alfred would like still work. I was like, oh, I can just do kill all Finder, like just as a shell script right here in Alfred. And, you know, boom, Finder reboots.

Remember back in the old Quicksilver days, the ultimate flex was to disable Finder? Yeah. That was a thing people were doing. Like, you'd look at their dock, and Finder just wasn't there anymore. And they're like, I don't need it. I got Quicksilver. I was like, man, you're such a nerd. Yeah. When you do that. Yeah. But yeah, I still use Finder occasionally. But yeah, I do basically use my keyboard to do most of my work, thanks to Alfred.

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So Alfred is not the only application in this area. It's definitely our favorite. We've mentioned LaunchBar a couple of times. LaunchBar is kind of the... It's one of the OGs in this area. It's been around a really long time. It's got a lot of similar features to Alfred. I think Alfred and LaunchBar, I mean, we even compared them directly in an episode a while back. Yeah. For me, though, just kind of personally, I think it's what I said in that episode, is...

Alfred kind of works the way my brain works and launch bar is kind of the other way around, but that's hard to, that's hard to describe. Yeah. I think, you know, right now you've got launch bar, Alfred and Raycast are the big hitters here. Quicksilver still exists. And I don't really understand why. Yeah. I wish somebody would really like bring Quicksilver back properly and

But it doesn't really feel to me like it's in the same league as the other three. No, not anymore. When people ask me, I really think they're all great. I mean, in the pre-launch of this field guide, I announced I'm going to release this field guide. People are writing me saying, well, I love Launch Bar. Somebody said, I love Raycast.

then stick with it because they're great. Those apps are awesome. I've used them. I pay for a license to a Raycast. I still use launch bar. I've got, I'm always checking to see what everybody's doing. But for me, the it's the workflows in Alfred that make it so handy and just the open nature of them, the way anybody can add to them. I just so often find that the thing I want to do with a keyboard launcher is kind of like just make something happen. And I,

In my experience, Alfred is the one that always delivers when I need to make something happen. And like I didn't even mention in our workflow discussion, there's one called menus. It's like it just searches your menus for whatever app you're in. And you type mspace and it gives you all the menus. So it's like no matter what it is I wanted to do, I can make Alfred do it.

And that's the reason I've stuck with that one. But I am not going to belittle any of the other competition because they are awesome. Raycast has just released a mobile app. And they're doing interesting stuff with AI. But for me, AI is the thing I mainly do in the AI apps. I don't do it in the launcher. So it just depends on your preference. But I love that these guys have different opinions and are trying different things.

Then Alfred's the one for me. Yeah. And Alfred has an iOS app, but it's basically like a remote for the Mac app. It is, it does not have a place in my world. It's kind of awesome though. I covered it in the guide, but it's basically, it's a remote control for your Mac and it's a secure way to do that. And like just the other night I was in the family room and

And my daughter says, dad, your computer is having an argument in there. And it was, it started playing an audio book. I have no idea why. Right.

But it's the studio. I got speakers in here. And so I just opened up the remote app. Because it's an iPhone app. You open it and just say, turn off music. And it stopped it. So I didn't have to go in there to turn off. But that's what that's for. It's not like a separate instance of Alfred. It's kind of a remote control app. But yeah, they have something, too. But I honestly, look, I'm not trying to convince you to switch launchers. If you've got one that works for you, stick with it.

But I think we are really have an abundance of riches now with LaunchBar, Raycast, and Alfred. Yeah, absolutely. It is an embarrassment of riches. Like we've seen in task managers and note-taking apps, this has really seen a lot of good competition over the last, I don't know, five years or so. Raycast isn't quite that old, but...

It's been very encouraging to see because these are nerdy tools, right? Like we mentioned, the average user is going to be just fine with Spotlight. Especially now that Spotlight does some of the web search and can do the fuzzy. It can cover the basics really well. But for those of us who want more or want to drive our computers from the keyboard more, it's great that we have these options. And I love that people are continuing to invest in them and make them better and better over time.

And these are apps that really magnify why the Mac is awesome because it gives you an open platform to do whatever you want. Amen, brother. Amen. I know I'm speaking to the choir here, but it's true. Yeah. It's what makes this platform great. And what sets it apart from, from the iPad? Can we talk about field guide production a little bit?

Yeah, totally. I love talking gear. It looks and sounds great, but I want to start with some of the organizational tools you're using because we've talked a lot about how the Mac Sparky empire has moved more and more into Notion over time. So how did that go this time around? It went really well. And this is, I think, the third field that I've produced out of Notion. So, you know, Notion is a database fundamentally. And

with a course like this, I starts with an out, I write an outline to the course, but then eventually it turns into a database and notion with a bunch of videos and sections in it. And the status field is key because I have an editor, JF, who, who does a lot of the post-production stuff for me. And he needs to know when, you know, I'm done and it's, it's in his court or like, if he sends me back a voiceover, I need to know that. So using the status fields and

you know, custom searches and views and notion. It's very easy for us to know exactly who's doing what. And that has been just no problem. And I've been very happy with it. And that's exactly what we need for kind of managing the flow. The big changes with this one was with the screen capture because I gave up on screen flow. You know, we've been using screen flow for, I don't know, 10 years, a long time.

But they just have not been updating the app. I talked about it on a feedback episode of Mac Power Users a while back. But at one point, I needed to make an edit on a labs video. And it could just not render the waveform appropriately. So every cut I made was wrong. And it was just driving me nuts. And there was a couple other things that I said, you know, I could spend hours trying to get this to work. Or I could spend hours learning a new app. And I switched. Yeah.

I think you made the right call. I mean, it looks great. We have not talked about this, but the next bullet point in our document says DaVinci Resolve. Yeah, so ScreenFlow is, I'm sorry, ScreenFlow is very powerful. It's a soup to nuts kind of screencast editing. It's the app I recommended for years. And so I did all of them there. So historically, field guides, we would make just all in ScreenFlow. Like even if I did a video, I would edit it in ScreenFlow.

And it does, you know, allows you to put captions in and do everything. Screen studio is not as powerful, but what it does do is allow you to do a really nice clean capture of the screen. And if you want animations, it can put animations in. So it does the capture part more reliably than screen flow does, but it doesn't give you the tool suite. So that means that in making this change, I like doubled the work because now we can't do it all in one app. We've got to move it between apps again.

JF prefers DaVinci Resolve over Final Cut, you know, and that's his like editor of choice. He's got the big keyboard with the jog wheel and everything, and he's a beast on it, you know? And I said, well, if the editor is using DaVinci Resolve, I need to use DaVinci Resolve as well because I do edits as well. And so this one was edited. The main edit was done entirely in DaVinci Resolve for both of us. Okay. Yeah.

How performant is that on Apple Silicon? Because, you know, Apple people and I think Apple itself is like, ah, Final Cut, we're, you know, from the metal on up. But I've heard good things about DaVinci Resolve on the Mac. Yeah, I, that was my resistance to it, frankly, because I watch all these Apple keynotes and they're like, we wrote Final Cut into the Silicon. So it's going to scream and it does scream.

But, you know, on my M2 Mac studio, DaVinci Resolve renders pretty damn fast. So I think it's just fine. I think probably final cuts ahead in terms of render time efficiency is

But the final cut, one thing about final cut that always drives me nuts is the file system. You know, I don't understand. Am I in my library? Am I in a project? What am I doing here? You know, I have to like relearn it every time I use the app. Whereas DaVinci Resolve is more of a kind of a traditional editor, but they're very hungry and adding new features all the time.

And, uh, I'm, I mainly switched over to it because the guy that I hired to do the Bane edits is using it. And I thought that would be silly for us to use two different platforms. Oh yeah. Um, but I'm picking it up pretty, pretty fast. Okay. I think I might need to order one of these fancy keyboards like Jan has. It's kind of fun, you know, but the, uh, but the, uh, yeah, it's really nice. And, um,

And so what happens, the result for the field guide is that, you know, the video recording is better than it's been, but also the

All the bits around it are better. Like the video, there's a lot of live video of me in this one. Well, not a lot, but there is some. And that's better because it's being edited in an application that's better for that than a screen flow. And like the audio, the cleaning of the audio is better. It's like all the little parts got a little tighter because we went to a professional video editing suite and added a little bit of time to the process.

And it, you know, it takes longer to make them, but the final product is good. And that's kind of what I'm aiming for here is I want something that's going to hold up.

Yeah. Y'all, y'all have really, I mean, from point of view of like viewing all of these things, y'all have gotten so good on the production side. Like if someone just dropped in and saw this and didn't know that it was really just you and a couple of people, it looks like something that's being produced by a whole team, not a dude in an extra room in his house. Like, you know what I mean? It really, I mean, my hats are off to y'all for, for how these things look and sound.

And credit due to JF there, because he's always thinking about ways to make it better. And so, you know, he's a really great help on that. Yeah. The last app you mentioned in our outline was Pixelmator Pro, now owned by Apple, which is weird. Yeah. Who knows what that means? But you're using it for titling.

Yeah, Pixelmator Pro. I thought I should acknowledge it because over the years, it's become more and more important to me. And creating the titling and the layering, I do all that in Pixelmator Pro. I'd done it in OmniGraffle for a long time, but it just evolved to a graphics app. And one of the things in DaVinci Resolve is it'll import that file, which is in Adobe Photoshop format.

And it can actually animate individual layers. Like that's something I'm pretty sure I can't do in Final Cut. So it's just like a lot of the professional tools are working together here to give the customer the best experience. And it's not that many and it's not that expensive really to put this suite together. But, you know, it takes some knowledge and effort and experience.

I am just really happy with the way these things go. I, you know, my goal with Mac Sparky has always been, I want to just keep doing it. I want it to be good and useful to people for a long time. I'm not looking to get rich, but I just want to be able to afford to keep, keep doing the work. And, and I do like seeing the way over time, the product has got better as a result of that.

Yeah, it's the Pixelmator, the whole family of software is really good. Yeah. Do you think Apple's going to leave it alone? What do you think Apple's going to do with it? You know, I don't know. I think about that more than I should for somebody. Like, I don't use Pixelmator daily. Like, I'm a Photoshop user for work. But I think about it all the time. I kind of hope they just leave them alone and just, like, let them...

continue to make the app better. That's basically what happened with Logic. You know, Apple didn't start Logic. They didn't even start Final Cut. They bought both of them. But my understanding is the Logic team is still very independent kind of from the rest of Apple and they do a great job. And I think that that model could really work for the Pixelmator team. So hopefully they just like, they have new resources, but they're

still get to like dictate what they want to do and, and do it on their own because both Pixelmator and Photomator are world-class. Like, I feel like some of those features are just inevitably going to end up in Apple photos that they're going to want to improve Apple photos.

But I hope that they don't just try and absorb it all into Apple Photos and just abandon Pixelmator because I really like Pixelmator. Yeah. And I don't think they would incorporate Pixelmator in a way that would be satisfactory. So hopefully they leave it alone.

Yeah. With the acknowledgement that some, they're going to definitely be using some of Pixelmator's features in photos going forward. And if photos gets better, that's great. But yeah, I could see Photomator getting wrapped up into Apple photos, but Pixelmator pro is like a different thing. Like it's a graphics editor, right? It's, it's much more Photoshop competitor than Photomator is. So maybe that, maybe they kind of split the difference there. Who knows? Yeah. Yeah.

Well, either way, gang, Alfred Field Guide. I'm very proud of it. If you're interested in Alfred, go check it out. MPU Alfred gets you 10% off. We'll put a link in the show notes and let me know what you think of it, especially with these production changes. I'd love to hear what the MPU audience thinks.

All right. We are the Mac power users. You can find us over at relay.fm slash MPU. Thank you to our sponsors today. One password, NetSuite and Ecamm. If you're a more power user subscriber, that's the folks that get the ad for extended version of the show. First, thank you. We really appreciate that. And second, stick around. We're going to be talking about Apple's legal woes. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.