We’ve been fans of Alfred for a few years now — it’s a great tool for searching through your Mac, launching apps, and performing workflows, all without taking your keys from the keyboard, and even with Apple’s recent Spotlight improvements, Alfred still goes the extra mile. So needless to say we’re thrilled to see the launch of Alfred 3 (free), bringing a whole list of cool enhancements to an already indispensable tool. The update adds some significant flexibility to building workflows, a new multimedia clipboard, snippet expansion, improved theme editing, and more.
Best of all, it’s still available for free, although the Powerpack upgrade is still available for £17 (around $25) for those who are looking for more advanced features; users who bought the single or family licensed Powerpack for Alfred 2 get a discounted upgrade, of course, while users with a “Mega Supporter” license get it for free.
With Alfred 3, you can now create more complex workflows that let you lay out your objects anywhere on the screen and chain different object types for more flexibility in getting a workflow to do what you want. You can also add notes to your workflow objects, and a whole collection of utility objects let you perform even more advanced tasks in your workflows without having to resort to custom scripting.
The new multimedia clipboard feature lets you copy images, file lists, and more to the Clipboard History so you can pull them up as needed, and snippet auto-expansion allows you to type in entire phrases by typing a single keyword. Major improvements have also been made to theming, file search and navigation, system commands, contacts integration, web searches, and accessibility.
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