Alfred Hat Tips

Over the past two years, you'll have found many tips and tricks on using Alfred here.

From now on, you'll find these tips (and much more!) on the Alfred blog.

Sign up to the RSS feed or pop by http://blog.alfredapp.com for fresh tips and news about Alfred features.

Mute and Unmute in iTunes Mini Player

You know the scenario. You have your music playing loud when all of a sudden the phone rings and you scramble to pause or close everything to get the silence you so require.

Next time this happens, try calling up the main Alfred window and type "mute". Magic.

New 'Help' Keyword in Alfred

User Tip: Automatic bookmarking and retrieval

My favorite @alfredapp feature? Automatic bookmarking and retrieval.

— Trevor Williams (@phase1g_o) February 13, 2012

A useful reminder of the URLs/History feature in Alfred where Alfred can store and show the history of URLs you've opened through the app thus serving as a quick and simple bookmarking tool.

Don't forget to enable this feature in Preferences > Features > URLs/History.

There's many ways to extend Alfred's magic skills in making you more productive beyond the Mac, for example in the case of helping you dial or send useful information to your phone straight from the interface. 

Here are three URI schemes/extensions that connect with other apps to extend Alfred's reach:

Dial Phone Number with Dialectic - helps you connect to Dialectic with a URI Scheme

myPhoneDesktop Extension - Send Phone Numbers, SMS, Plain text, Images and Text files to myPhoneDesktop directly from Alfred

User Tip: Drag a folder from Alfred onto the "Save" dialogue

Just found that dragging a folder from @alfredapp to the save/load dialogue box switches to that foldertehsh.it/k0tlOssom.

I bet you've seen our Alfred Extensions site by now, with goodies created by Alfred users and helping you stretch Alfred's capabilities that much further. 

We update the site and individual categories regularly with new extensions that come our way. Check out these pages now and you might spot some that you've been hoping for:

Music Extensions

Productivity Extensions

Control Your Mac Extensions

Web Extensions

Actions Extensions

Assign global hotkeys to your most used folders

Is there one folder that you access over and over again during your day? You know which one I'm talking about: the one with the current project, or the constant reference folder, the one with your secret plans to take over the world. 

Assign Global Hotkeys to Alfred Extensions

Extensions add the awesome sauce in terms of customisation & advanced features in Alfred and with version 1.0 you now have another way to access them quickly:

assign global hotkeys to your individual extensions (and optionally pass a parameter)

You could then have a quick hotkey which:

shows you how much battery time you have left (using this extension) so you can save precious real estate in your menu bar 

shows or hides the desktop and all icons on it (for example with this extension)

toggles wifi on or off (have a look at WifiToggle here)

And so much more! This might be a good time to check out our extensive library of user-created extensions if you're looking for some inspiration. Then get excited about how productive you're getting and do a little happy dance. Well, up to you of course :).

Wishing you a productive day,

Here's an oldie but goodie from our Twitter stream:

Excellent tip from @danbenjamin on 5by5 for using @1password bookmarks in Safari, which are then searchable by Alfred: 5by5.tv/b2w/44

— Alfred App (@alfredapp) December 13, 2011

In short: 1Password allows you to drag your specific-site logins to the bookmarks bar and access them quickly by clicking on that specific bookmark from there. If you don't want to have to click on your bookmark, though, remember that you can use Alfred to search through your Safari bookmarks (either with "find" or even set these up to appear in Default Results in Alfred's preferences). Then you'll have a quick way to securely open and log into the sites you use most often. 

Encode spaces as + for custom searches

Don't forget that with the new version of Alfred (1.0), you can also encode spaces as + for your custom searches. 

URL History and adding bookmarks to Alfred

From version 1.0, Alfred can now remember all the URLs that you launch through the app. 

Simply call up Alfred, type a URL and hit Return. The next time you start typing this URL, Alfred will suggest it in the results. Just make sure you have "Store and Show history of URLs in Alfred" ticked in the preferences.

Use Snippets without Clipboard History enabled

With version 1.0 you no longer need to have Clipboard History enabled to be able to use the snippet functionality inside Alfred.