796: The Alfred Field Guide

Hello and welcome back to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hacken. I'm joined by my friend and yours, also the man of the hour, Mr. David Spark. Thanks, Steven. You're always the man of my hour, David. You too, buddy. You too. 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. So awesome. So we're going to get into that day. We're going to talk about Alfred, what you can do with it.

I think it's basically kind of known like it's in the category of app launchers, but 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. It kind of grew out of my use of Alfred. All the field guides are apps that I'm passionate about. I am very fast on my keyboard, on my Mac, and it's because of Alfred. I've got all these cool workflows and things plugged into it. like occasionally people look over my shoulder and they're like, wait, what, what did you just do? You know? 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, you know, 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. And I said, 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. But the benefit is I've got a really cool soup to nuts coverage of Alfred.

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 the final number. I think it's about 83 or so. Wow. And it's about four and a half hours. I always get pushed back on. It's like, well, how would you make four hours on a keyboard launcher? Well, it's a field guide. It covers everything. You don't have to watch it all. Just watch the parts that matter to you. But one of the things I did in this one is I went through...

Just on the Alfred website alone, they have 300 plus workflows. And workflows in Alfred are like these really cool plugins. Like you can add features to it. 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 customer, how to build your own workflows. So it was a real fun process making this field guide. 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 and the Alfred Field Guide.

And I think this one in particular really struck me as I was going through it over the last several days is that you really can like, oh, I don't use some of these apps like this particular workflow is not interesting to me or pertinent to me. 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.

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. And my experience is exactly like yours. Like the thought of uninstalling it and building it back up from scratch.

is a little scary because honestly, I don't even know everything. I was looking through my Alfred setup as I was watching the field guide video. I was 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. Well, it gives you a lot of power to do that.

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 them. You're one of them. Stephen's in it. This is your... 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 because you could do that. It's his text expansion tool and like just different angles on the application.

But the goal of this course really is to give you Alfred's superpowers and... It's working. I mean, I released it before we recorded to the lab simbers, 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.

That's what I want for people going through this course to really just kind of to nail it down. 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. If you don't offer it, 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've got to charge the maximum when you release it. And I'm like, yeah, but those are the people that support me. I want to give them a deal. So I do the opposite. I give 10% off at the beginning. I'll put it back to regular price. The price on this one is $69. So it went up a little bit, but I think it's worth it. I put a lot of effort and hired people.

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

We've got people who really pay attention to what we do and want to support it. And then you've got people who will come across this over time. I think it's right to treat those audiences differently.

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 and i really like i think production wise this is probably one of the best if not the best i've ever shipped and um 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 felt 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... Oh, God. 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.

Well, yeah, 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 kind of want to frame the basics conversation with you is, why would someone look at a third-party launcher If they're just finding applications, opening applications, searching for files and folders over what Apple has done with Spotlight. I think for a lot of people, they wouldn't. I mean, like...

My wife is the ultimate casual user. And the idea of her trying to use her keyboard to prep and send an email, that's just not going to happen. 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 a written interview. 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 use some power features.

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. You know, it's so key to my work. Like, I would be fine paying a subscription to them. But in their current model, what I've done is I've just bought the power pack.

each time. 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 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 kind of like explain the concept of the app for people who haven't used it before. But I mean, the main thing is.

you invoke Alfred, like you invoke Spotlight. Spotlight is command space by default. Actually, command space for me is Alfred. Same. And then off you go, right? 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 record it 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 a dumb little thing. But it's so much easier than going to settings and keyboard and looking at the battery status or buying a separate app or 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. And just imagine that magnified across. all of your your mac you know one of the 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 depending on what you do, it can really make a difference. Yeah, absolutely.

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

Like, do you speak Albert? Yeah, I do. B-T-B. B-T-B, yeah. Yeah. I think that means something else. Don't Google it, you know. I don't even know, and don't bring me... but I'm young enough to think that maybe it does. But old enough to not every show. I'm old enough not even to realize that I just stepped on a landline. My foot is off and I didn't even realize it. 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, you know, it's so valuable to me. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password. Go to 1Password.com to get 20% off. If you've got a business, you should be looking at 1Password.

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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 launch pad 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.

but that's not how the word is spelled. 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, you know, 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.

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

And you get that with the free version. So it's a nice upgrade to Spotlight in that sense. But I think really that one of the parts that people miss out on is files and folders. Alfred is excellent to get you to a file and folder and so many people. Waste so much time opening a Finder window, drilling down with the mouse, trying to get it. Then 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.

The fuzzy search and learning kind of what I meant is one of those things that... Again, I hadn't thought about it in a long time, but as soon as I came across it in the field, I was like, oh, yeah. So I have this numbers document I open every week for something at Relay. I just type CO and it remembers it because 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 adapts to and learns over time. And it really speeds things up. Yeah, totally. And that's what you want, right? You want a launcher that kind of learns the way your brain thinks and just performs based on that. And this app is 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.

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, you know, 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... 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 you 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. 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 in 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 can make space, start talking to someone's name. and it will not only find someone's name in my contacts, but 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 copy that data out.

I hit command L to see your number really big if I want to call it. It's not only that I can point it at certain types of data, it's that it can also make that data useful in the context. of Alfred itself. Another thing you can do on that screen when you have a contact app, 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 like 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 like.

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 used that because I was constantly, you know. And then I'd 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, it was silly. But the weird screencaster stories, I guess. But it does give you very granular control over that stuff. 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. 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.

So you get a bunch of stuff with Alfred free. But I really think if you're going to use Alfred, just get the power pack. 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 perk. Oh 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, it's 59 pounds. There's not, I mean, there's not a ton of Mac productivity applications with a 15-year track record like Alfred. The free lifetime upgrades is a heck of a deal because this thing's not going anywhere. And it's been a real stalwart of the Mac. ecosystem for a long time.

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 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 offered window. 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. With a file, it might be file actions. I can move it somewhere, save it, copy it, attach it to an email, things like that. 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

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 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 scramble and look something up as we're recording... I would inevitably mess that Finder window up and then have to go back to it. And I kind of use open Finder windows or even minimized Finder windows as placeholders for a project I'm working on at a time. And so being able to use Universal Actions and navigate a folder.

and 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 finder and like find exactly what I'm looking for or move it or copy it and and not disrupt whatever else I was 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 Action that 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 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. There's also the action ordering so I have that enabled where it sorts actions by the last use.

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... I may want them at a given time. So have you customized yours 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 be reading 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. You know, that's a good example of Alfred. It's very flexible. So, you know, it's got that logic in there, that fuzzy logic that it can apply kind of anywhere, and they do give you the option to use or not use it.

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 i like to turn that stuff off but you've got the option either way yeah and uh

That's funny because I absolutely abhor that spaces option, but that's exactly what I want, Alfred. I don't know what that says. That's cool. Customization, baby. It's the name of the game today.

Another way that you can customize your experience on your Mac with Alfred is with web search. Yeah. So it's got a bunch of built-in web searches in there. So let's say you like to look at YouTube images. I'm sorry, Google images. 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 transfer. I want to drop an image of a baseball in a presentation. You know, I'll just type Alfred. img baseball transparent and then it just goes and searches 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 the YouTube search bar or go and mouse my way in Safari to Google Images like an animal. I just do all that stuff through Alfred. 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 give it the root URL, and then you tell it, hey, 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.

Like, I even have one for Max Markey because, like... 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 KAGI, you know, K-A-G-I, the alternative search engine. I mean, I spend $10 a month for a search engine. You know, 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. 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. Especially if I'm in the flow of writing something or doing show notes. I don't have to go over to my browser and then go to Google or whatever search engine I'm using. I can just do it again in the flow of whatever I'm already doing.

Yeah. And once you get them out of 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? Because you get to information so quickly. And think about this. You do like a... 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 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's the kind of things you get when you start mastering these types of utilities.

I want to talk about the clipboard history tools. 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.

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 lists. You can set how long to keep it. You can go in here and do, like, the advanced section. Like, hey, um... ignore these applications, or do I want it to automatically paste this if I hit return? It is really powerful, and I can set 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 512 pixels i will go like if i'm going to link to something someone has written 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.

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 in 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.

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 Clibboard history is the search. I've got a bunch of stuff in my clipboard history. I was working on something yesterday that had some HTML code in it, and I don't see it anywhere now. I just typed HTML, and it just gave me the exact entry I was looking for.

And that is a benefit. Clipboard history is great. 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...

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 my clipboard history whirlwind is really cool. And like another feature they have that, you know, there are apps out there you can buy for this is a snippet feature where, you know, you type.

you know, a few keystrokes and your cell phone appears or whatever. In fact, Apple has this built into the system. There's, you know, TextExpander is an 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.

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 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 that 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. But again, it's like, you know, getting in 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 keystrokes. 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 offering 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 macOS 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 um you know, particular needs for color or text size or something like it's all extremely customizable. Sometimes I find myself going the exact opposite direction and getting a theme that looks really old just for nostalgia. I don't know, it's fun, but it gives you the ability to make those choices. So you've got all these features built into the application.

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 offer team, but there's a bunch of community-developed workflows. And that's where this application really takes off.

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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. When I started recording the field guide, there was 300 plus on this page. 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 offer team is very open about these workflows. Like there's, several Bluetooth management workflows. They didn't just get one from the community and say, okay, no more allowed. 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. cover different problems slightly differently and give you the ability to really customize the experience.

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. 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... 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.

This one's called Kagi Search. Somebody's made a Kagi workflow. I built my own, but somebody's done it now. So it's there for me. If I wanted, I could have just used this. And it's really... a massively useful tool set. Like one of the ones I use that I didn't cover in the field guide because it's so knit. 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 nice one I usually have to the big blocky one that I use for screencast. And I don't have to go into the control center and mouse or do anything. I just type RES and then a few right arrows and it returns and 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.

One that I love is called Link Clean. And you and I both, our currency at work is URLs. And very often you go to a URL and maybe you open it from an email or social media and it has a bunch of tracking stuff on it. 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 a utm underscore source equals 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 any gross stuff. And I use it a billion times a day, I think. yeah and the way that one works is It depends on the basic configurations. When I use it, 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 keyboard efficiency in mind. Yeah.

And that's what I love about them. Another one, we talked at one point, you talked about the One Thing 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 EnvyAlt used to work back in the day. Very, very fast. You can search titles and bodies and folder names, 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 note search i know it's not that many compared to some people um And many compared to others. And the note search is fine, but it's kind of fiddly. And being able to very quickly pull something from Alfred is sweet.

Yeah, and like that one is, I covered that one, of course, because I just think it's... It's so much faster than the built-in system in 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 evolved there. And I love that. I love that workflow. It's one of my favorites. So there's a lot of different workflows available to you. If you want to just convert units really quickly, that's a good one. Or 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, it's just... do a search Alfred workflow, insert problem, and see what comes up. Yeah, and it's not just big mainstream applications like TOT, which is a text document sort of thing that we've talked about in the past.

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 mainline, the omni-focuses of the world. It's also... 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. 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 Mech 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.

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 uh shortcut launcher called bypass

And so I cover it in Field Guide. But then I actually asked Stephen 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. It's funny to me, kind of the personal stories that come out of the process of making these because like Stephen is like a friend, but he's also a huge contributor to how I use Alfred. Yeah, he does some amazing work.

Anyway, a couple others that stood out for me. CleanShotX, 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 CleanShotX that when I was going through... the library of all these available workflows i saw one for clean shot x i'm like i don't even know that existed like it wouldn't occur to me to think well clean shot x is is uh 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. It's kind of fun adding features to this app. Yeah. The clean shot one in particular is nice because I use bartender and clean shot is hidden for me. And so if I want to go find it, especially if I'm just on my Mac book 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 uh it's like oh i can just do it from alfred like i don't need to go find uh go find this this tool somewhere i can just do it for my keyboard 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 it covers, the 1Password workflow.

which is, full disclosure, a sponsor of the show. Sure. But I use the app every day. 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 1Password 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 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 password. So just type 1P and then Alfred goes and gets it for me. So the workflows are something that is really great, and it makes Alfred into a very personal application. So 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, 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 Reminders doesn't have a quick way to access stuff, but I could write shortcuts to open specific Reminders lists and just 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 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 offer 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, where you're kind of dragging boxes out and connecting them.

setting hotkeys or like, oh, pull in an external Apple script here. I want to use a file action over here. really pretty easy to do And because they're just a file at the end of the day, You can export it and 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 see exactly what they're doing. You can click on any of those little nodes in the editor and see exactly what it's doing. That helps me feel better because some of these things I didn't build, I'm using other people's. And I'd like to go see what they're up to and see how they're doing things. And 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 AppleScript 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... and trigger a bunch of automation just with that command space.

I think that is probably one of the most useful things for it. 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. 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.

For a while, I was having trouble with Finder hanging on my machine. This was a few years ago. But Alfred would still work. I was like, oh, I can just do kill all Finder just as a shell script right here in Alfred. You know, boom, find a reboot. Remember back in the old Quicksilver days, the ultimate flex was to disable Finder?

Yeah. That was a thing people were doing. You'd look at their doc and the finder just wasn't there anymore. 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 Launch Bar, I mean, we even compared them directly in an episode a while back. Yeah. For me, though, just kind of personally, I think is what I said in that episode is...

Alfred kind of works the way my brain works, and LaunchBar is kind of the other way around, but that's hard to describe. I think right now, you've got LaunchBar, Alfred, and Raycast are the big hitters here. Quicksilver still exists. And I don't really understand why. I wish somebody would really bring Quicksilver back properly, but it doesn't really feel to me like it's in the same league as the other three. No, not at all.

When people ask me, I really think, like, they're all great. I mean, you know, in the pre-launch of this field guide, I've announced I'm going to release this field guide. People are writing me saying, well, I love LaunchBar or somebody saying, 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 Raycast, I still use LaunchBar. I'm always checking to see what everybody's doing. But for me, 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. In my experience, Alfred is the one that always delivers when I need to make something happen.

Like I even mentioned in our workflow discussion, there's one called menus. It just searches your menus for whatever app you're in. And you type in space and it gives you all the menus. So it's like, no matter what it is I want it to do, I can make Alfred do it. And that's the reason I've stuck with that one. 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 a 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. And 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 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 map. And it's a secure way to do that. And like just the other night, I was in the family room. M My daughter says, Dad, your computer is having an argument in there. And it started playing an audio book. I have no idea why, right? But it's the studio. I got speakers in here. So I just opened up the remote app because it's an iPhone app. You open it and just say, turn off, you know.

music and it stopped it. So I didn't have to go in there to turn it 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 to, 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 having 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.

I love that people continue 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, that's what makes this platform great and what sets it apart 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... uh the max 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 write an outline to the course. But then eventually it turns into a database in Notion with a bunch of videos and sections in it. And the status field is key because I have an editor, JF, 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 in his court or like if he sends me back a voiceover, I need to know that. So using the status fields and... custom searches and views in 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 managing the flow. The big changes with this one was with the screen capture because I gave up on ScreenFlow. I've been using ScreenFlow 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 MacPowerUsers a while back. 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.

I think you made the right call. I mean, it looks great. We have not talked about this, but the next bullet point, 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 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 ScreenFlow does, but it doesn't give you the tool suite. That means that in making this change, I doubled the work because now we can't do it all in one app. We've got to move it between apps.

JF prefers DaVinci Resolve over Final Cut. And that's his editor of choice. He's got the big keyboard with the jog wheel and everything, and he's a beast on it. 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. 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. Yeah, 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 Cut's ahead in terms of render time efficiency. But... One thing about Final Cut that always drives me nuts is the file system. I don't understand. Am I in my library? Am I in my project? What am I doing here? I have to 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 I mainly switched over to it because the guy that I hired to do the main edits is using it, and I thought that would be silly for us to use two different platforms. Oh, yeah. But I'm picking it up pretty fast. Okay. I think I might need to order one of these fancy keyboards like Jan has. It's kind of fun. But yeah, it's really nice.

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...

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... screen flow and like the audio um the cleaning of the audio is better like 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 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 have really, I mean, from point of view of, like, viewing all 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 credit due to JF there because he's always thinking about ways to make it better. And so 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. 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. creating the titling and the layering. I do all that in Pixelmator Pro. I've done it on the Gravel 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. 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.

I'm just really happy with the way these things go. My goal with Max 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 doing the work. And I do like seeing the way, over time, the product has got better as a result of that.

Yeah, 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? I don't know. I think about that more than I should for somebody. I don't use Pixelmator daily. 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 let them...

continue to make the app better. That's basically what happened with Logic. 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 pixel meter team. So hopefully they just like, they have new resources, but.

still get to like dictate what they want to do and do it on their own because both Pixelmator and Photomator are world class. 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 like...

absorb it all into Apple Photos and just abandon Pixelmator because I really like Pixelmator. And I don't think they would incorporate Pixelmator in a way that would be satisfactory. So hopefully they leave it alone. with the acknowledgement that they're going to definitely be using some of Pixelmator's features in Photos going forward. And if Photos gets better, that's great. Yeah, I could see Photomator.

getting wrapped up into apple photos but pixel mater pro is like a different thing like it's a graphics editor right it's it's much more photoshop competitor than photomater is so maybe that maybe they kind of split the difference there who knows 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 your 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 NPU audience thinks. Alright, we are the Mac Power Users. You can find us over at relay.fm slash mpu. Thank you to our sponsors at A1Password, NetSuite, and Ecamm.

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