I decided to share this with the Alfred team at the GetSatisfaction web site. Within an hour I received a reply from Andrew, the lead developer, and found that the feature was already being coded into the next release (.90). Check out the entire conversation here to find out what feature I was missing.
Now that's service. Nice job Andrew and thanks for being so responsive to your users! Full-disclosure time, I purchased the Mega Supporter License which provide free lifetime support. I highly recommend this Doc’s Tech Notes Mac readers. Even though Alfred is in beta, it is still the most stable launcher for the Mac I have used. And rumor has it that the price will increase when the app is out of beta. Are you an Alfred user? Drop me a comment and let me know. Would you like to see me post some Alfred tips and tricks similar to my QSB Knols? Let me know that as well.
You should take a look at Quicksilver again now it's being actively developed by team of very talented, competant & committed voluntary devs.
ReplyDeleteThey recently pushed out a new update & are working now not just on bug fixes but also new plugins/improvements. I've been using Quicksilver ever since Alcor disappeared & despite rumours that it had fallen by the wayside it has never let me down.
It's also, as I'm sure you'll know, a hundred times more versatile & powerful than Alfred. (Even including Alfred's Powerpack). And as there's now a larger team devoted to it's development than Alfred has I can only imagine that gulf increasing.
On the aesthetics side Quicksilver bests Alfred too, there being around a dozen different interfaces for Quicksilver & the BezelHUD interface in particular being far more elegant than what I remember of Alfred when I last took a glance at it.
And, of course, the developers of Quicksilver pride themselves on the fact that is & always will be totally free.
So to sum up, more powerful, under very active development, looks nicer & is free. No contest in my book.
@GWEEE. Thanks for the great comments. When using QS in the past, and I believe this was actually after Alcor left, it would regularly hang and I would see the beach-ball ’o death. This seemed to be more prevalent as I added my favorite plugins. It became very frustrating to have to fire up the Activity Monitor and force quit the app. Can you verify that it is more stable now? You tell me this and I'll gladly replace Alfred on one of my Macs and give it another shot.
ReplyDeleteAnd I will fess up and tell you that I do prefer the QS workflow. The tab key always seemed to be more natural than the right-arrow equivalent in Alfred. And as you mention, FREE just can't be beat.
I think there were quite a few incompatibilities with plugins that caused a lot of problems with the change from 10..5 to 10.6 which was around when Alcor jumped ship. All the serious problems have been quashed now.
ReplyDeleteThey've got a brand new website which's the place to go to get downloads & have a look at all the new plugins etc. There's a particularly good 1Password plugin that's probably new since you last looked at Quicksilver.
Also compatibility with Lion's been confirmed so it seems Quicksilvers going to be around for a while to come.
The website's http://qsapp.com/
And if you do have any problems they're really good with support as well.