saulrosenbaum.com / The beauty of simplicity

Recently I switched my launcher of choice to ‘Alfred’ a nifty indie project that I became aware of via Twitter, in the past I’ve been both a Quicksilver and LaunchBar user - both extremely powerful apps that although I used them religiously, each had quirks I never could really get past (QS had stability issues, LB was stable but I never wrapped my head around it’s particular method of bringing back results, and it wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants)

Alfred is in beta, but seems stable, visually pretty, and actively developed (which I really appreciate) - And has most of the features you’d want in a launcher - but I want to talk about a single feature, that I really like, Alfred’s use of spotlight comments allows you to create groups of essentially unrelated apps, it’s so simple, so obvious (and honestly it may have worked with LaunchBar too, but I never checked) just add your desired key work to all the apps you want in a group and BOOM! done - I add ‘webd’ to Transmit, Coda, Textmate, Cssedit and Espresso and evoke Alfred and it just works, you can assign as many keywords to an app as you want, for example I add ‘ftp’ to transmit as well.

It’s a simple feature I really appreciate, and we all know how hard simple actually is. So if you’re in the market for a nifty, pretty, deceptively powerful launcher that’s only going to get better - take a look at Alfred.