It is actively maintained, well designed, easy to use, and extremely powerful. Moreover, Alfred is what I recommend over at The Sweet Setup as one of the applications all moderately computer savvy folks should use on their Mac.Īlfred is, without question, a fantastic app. I conducted a detailed survey back in 2011 and another more casual one a few months ago, and the majority response to those surveys was that people use Alfred as their application launcher of choice. I think it’s fair to say that the king of the Application Launcher Market is Alfred. And, in fact, it was this type of shortcoming that actually lead to the development of LaunchBar - the original 3rd-party application launcher.
Though the Dock is convenient and ever-present, there are some shortcomings that a dedicated application launcher such as LaunchBar solves. For example: Mail is Shift+Command+M Tweetbot is Alt+Command+T nvALT is Alt+Command+N. And so, in order to instantly activate an application I use a second application, Keyboard Maestro. There are two functions that I consider to be the most important with an application launcher: (a) quickly finding and launching applications, files, and more and (b) instantly activating an application or script with the use of a pre-defined global hotkey.Īlas, LaunchBar, which is this author’s application launcher of choice, does not have global keyboard shortcuts built in. And there is Launchpad, but does anybody use it? Spotlight is also an application launcher. The Dock, for example, is the premier application launcher and it ships with OS X. Though LaunchBar is the original (not including the NeXTSTEP Dock), it’s not the only application launcher available on the Mac today.įor the sake of this article, an application launcher will be defined as any tool on your computer which provides a shortcut to finding and activating files and programs. So where did this idea of an application launcher come from? I’m glad you asked… Other application launchers With Yosemite, Apple has promoted Spotlight to a more front-and-center position, and they are giving it a bit more “power”. They literally learn your behavior by weighting certain search results and findings based on your usage over time, and they can be customized to only index the things you’re interested in accessing so that they act as fast as possible. LaunchBar and Alfred actually become more personalized as you use them. Some use cases for an application launcher include launching apps, launching bookmarks, launching AppleScripts, performing custom searches on various sites, doing quick mathematical calculations, opening files, getting at the recently-opened files within a certain app, accessing the clipboard history, performing actions on files (like grabbing a document and attaching it to an email, or resizing an image), and more.īottom line, what makes an application launcher such a critical tool is that it’s the fastest way launch and act on common apps, documents, bookmarks, and more.īut it doesn’t end there. The whole point is fast launching and fast actions. It should come up instantly when prompted, it should respond instantly, and I should never feel lost or confused when using it.
If ever there was an app that needed to be as frictionless as possible, it would be the application launcher. There are plenty of other apps I spend more time in, but none I use more frequently than my application launcher. In 2011 I spent several months using Alfred, and I’ve switched over to it on occasion since then as well to stay abreast of its development. My first application launcher was Quicksilver, but when it farted out on Snow Leopard in 2009 I switched to LaunchBar. I spend about 6 of my working hours at my Mac, which equates to using LaunchBar about once every 10 minutes. On average, I bring up LaunchBar about 40 times per day when I’m working at my computer. Without LaunchBar installed it’s like I’m at a friend’s house, trying to navigate to the kitchen in the middle of the night and I can’t find the light switches and I keep stubbing my toes on the furniture. Whenever I do a clean install of my Mac (which is less often these days), the first application I download is LaunchBar.īecause to me, my application launcher is how I get around my computer. Want to launch an app on your Mac? There is, ahem, an app for that. For the persnickety power-user, there is but one way to navigate around a computer: with the keyboard.
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