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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.

If you’ve been here before you may notice the site looks noticeably different - what was once dark red, now white, the visual challenge of reading blue off red is gone - in it’s place; miles and miles of white - don’t get used to it - as I get more and more familiar with butchering, torturing and spindling WordPress (I’m a hardcore EE guy usually) - it’s libel to get very strange up in this bitch. Until them… enjoy the white :)

Just a glamour photo of Maxx!, He’s a excellent Cat, handsome, loyal and a great player of ‘fetch’…

I make no claim of being a good photographer, I think 25 years as a designer has provided me a decent eye for composition and color, I’m also really practiced at photographing cats, any magic in these shots has to be attributed to the cats - I was just fortunate enough to get the camera focussed, and to press the shutter - it’s as simple as that - Both shot with a 50mm prime lens, which the more I use, the more I love.

Always fun when a client unexpectedly sends me cool stuff - this super8 Kodak Instamatic M22 will fit perfectly in my camera collection (mostly pre-1975 consumer movie cameras) The fact that this one comes with box/instructions and unexposed film is just a bonus. Thanks Barney!

I’ve written more of these posts than any one person should ever have too - but this one is perhaps the hardest, I had been kidding myself that my terminally ill cat ROO would beat the odds, and somehow recover from mouth cancer - when we had taken him to the oncologist he had been given two to four months, and being the amazingly stoic boy he was, he made it four months without even a whimper, I thought (irrationally so) that if he could make it past the four months the oncologist was wrong - and maybe she was wrong about everything, and that ROO could make a full recovery - denial is a powerful thing.

On the morning of the 25th my palace of denial came crashing down, ROO wanted to eat, but simply physically couldn’t, ‘T’ and I both knew it was time. I somehow managed to keep it together (barely) and we helped ROO cross the Rainbow Bridge.

I love all my cats equally, but ROO touched our hearts in such a way that his absence in our house is painful - I keep expecting to see him walk in the room - tail held high. We love you big guy, we’re honored to have been your forever family..

Update: Sadly Brave Blackey was struck and killed by a car on November 8th (2009-11-08), NIne days after I took this photo.

Took a short walk to clear my head, it was a grayish autumn day, but if you look closer, happiness is everywhere.