Over the last few weeks I have been trailing out a few New Mac Apps that help out with general day to day use both during development and in general Mac Use. I will be doing a blog posting to cover the ones I have found useful and the ones that I didn't quite get but would be interested in feedback in where I have goen wrong ;)

One of the latest ones, is Alfred in a nutshell it's a Application Launcher much like the main one people use on the Mac QuickSilver. I've never been a QuickSilver power user, and just used it as an Application Launcher, to save on having to go to Applications and open the application I needed.

After I saw some references on twitter to Alfred and thought I would give it ago, since I first installed it I've liked it's clean, speedy interface. It's still in early beta at version 0.5 today but I think it has the makings of a great QuickSilver replacement in time to come.

One of the great features of the 0.5 release which opened my eyes to a feature in Mac OS X was the spotlight comments:

If you right click an application, select Get Info  the application info box pops up and you can enter a comment for Spotlight and in the case of Alfred it becomes a quick entry code so for FireFox; I have entered a comment of FF and now when I go to Alfred and I type FF - Firefox is selected. Which is a cool feature for me anything that reduces typing is all good!

Some of the other cool features that Alfred has are:

• Direct Search to Google. IMDB and others
• Dictionary Spell & Define
• Basic calculator
• Google translation

I've been talking to the developers directly over email and I have to say they are a great bunch and they have some great plans for future releases of Alfred so if you're like me and are not a power user of QuickSilver and what a quick way to open your applications then go give Alfred a try out. As you start to use it you'll find it more and more powerful, and right now it's doesn't have all the power it will ;) 

The other thing that I really do like about Alfred is that the guys building it are in the UK, and doing it their spare time so if you find the application useful please go to Alfred Preferences and selected Donate ;)