We're very excited about all the things Alfred can do and the new functions that are being added every day. But sometimes you just want to get started quickly, figure out the basics and launch in. Here's your chance to do this with a short 101-style guide that will get you set up and searching in no time.

In this post, we'll cover:

• Basic web searches
• Setting your own web searches keywords
• Alfred's fallback searches
• Forcing specific searches

Basic searches

Alfred is great for launching applications on your desktop. But it's also great for helping you use the Internet much more quickly than if you were to manually click on a browser icon in your dock and only then start typing in your search.

Instead, just launch your Alfred with a simple keyboard shortcut (which you can set up in Preferences > General) and start your search with a specific keyword. If you want to search Google, start with "google" followed by your desired search.

Similarly, you can search specific websites with the use of specific keywords, just as in the examples below:

To find a complete list of the keywords that are currently available, just go to Preferences > Features, and tap Web Searches on the left side to have a look.

Setting keywords

The keywords for your searches are fully customisable. If a different one makes more sense to you, or you're a speed wizard eager to shorten searching time even more, simply double click on the keyword you wish to change and then type in your new preferred change:

Which will then result in this:

Now you're all set to be the fastest Internet user around.

Fallback searches

Sometimes, even Alfred gets confused about what you're asking him to do. In that case, he will try to guess, usually falling back on a number of general searches you might have in mind. Most often he'll resort to Google or Wikipedia. Admit it, you wanted the help anyway...

Forcing specific searches

Ultimately, however, you are still the master and Alfred is here to serve you. That's why we've added the option to force a search option, no matter what Alfred thinks you're looking for. To set these up, go to Preferences > General > Results and choose what happens when you hit a certain key combination instead of simple return. In the example below, pressing alt + return will always result in a Google search:

Underneath, I want to search for the word "Dropbox" on the Internet/locally/etc. and not actually open the application. I'd therefore simply type in the word and hit alt + return, which would then perform a general web search for me.

This wraps up the first Alfred guide. Many more coming soon.

We've been working tirelessly on the latest few versions of Alfred, adding plenty of new functionality for your enjoyment.

View the full change log for all new features and fixes since 0.6, but here are some highlights:

• The Sparkle update framework has been integrated for painless updating
• New System Commands: Type "sleep", "shutdown", "screen saver", "logout", "restart", "empty trash" for quick actions
• Completely overhauled preferences: Find and tweak Alfred preferences easily
• Basic "Play" feature to launch music tracks in your favourite music player
• Improved URL & character encoding to improve support for non-English users
• Increased Alfred speed significantly (by ~365% according to our tests!), further reducing CPU load
• Added Appsfire as a default search, enabling you to search for apps directly from Alfred

As we have completely rejigged the preferences section, this Alfred update will reset your preferences to default, so you'll need to choose your hotkey and location again. It does not affect your custom sites, however.

This is just the beginning, as we've got much more exciting stuff lined up for the next few months.

Quick tip: If you're here, you're probably a curious tinkerer, right? You can help us test Alfred pre-releases before they go out to the public by ticking the pre-releases box in the General > Updates tab within the preferences section.

Last night, we released the 0.6 beta which you can now download from the homepage.

A lot of work has gone into 0.6, from adding new features to optimising what's already there for speed and efficiency. In summary, here are some of the key changes:

• Custom searches: Add your own sites to search with Alfred
• Optional fuzzy matching on Applications (eg. "thl" would find The Hit List)
• Rewritten word matching and relevancy parsing for efficiency, notably reducing CPU usage
• Improved default search scopes
• Assign ctrl, alt, cmd + enter to action search results
• New web searches & locales added
• Hotkey improvements including double-tapping Cmd

As usual, the full list of changes is available on the change log.

We've come a long way, baby

Over Twitter, here on the blog and in person, we often get asked "When will Alfred do X? When will this feature be added?" We love hearing your suggestions - along with our development roadmap, they help us shape the future of Alfred and work out which features you really want. It isn't always easy prioritising features, but we hope you're liking the direction the app is taking to date.

For a bit of perspective on how much has changed since the first release - a mere two months ago - here is a screenshot of the preferences when Alfred first came out on 28th February 2010.

In Alfred 0.4 beta, there were only 3 preferences: Setting your hotkey, choosing from a limited number of locales and a colour theme. We find it hard to believe how much the app has changed and the community grown in little more than 8 weeks!

As we continue to develop Alfred, one of the biggest challenges will be to balance new features requests with the simplicity that makes Alfred unique.

PPC version

We have released an unsupported PowerPC version of Alfred. For PPC users who choose to download it, we recommend turning off the update checker (under General > Updates), as this tracks the Intel version of the app.

We cannot guarantee the stability of this version but first reports point to it being fully functional so, if you're a PPC user, welcome to Alfred!

It's now just over a month since we first launched Alfred. The first thing we'd like to say is a huge thank you to the +13,000 people who have downloaded Alfred, tested it, reviewed it, commented about it on Twitter or otherwise helped spread the word.

Today, we are releasing version 0.5.6 beta, the fourth public release to date. It's full of new features and improvements, as the lengthy change log shows since 0.5 two weeks ago.

A few highlights:

• Performance: Pre-caching of apps & significant speed improvements
• Basic update checker which pops up "Update available" message
• Improved local search scope preferences
• Improved relevancy and accuracy of results (This is just the start, there's still a lot to do here)
• Bit.ly shortcut creation (using "bitly" keyword)
• UI design tweaks
• Added new countries to locales
• Advanced calculator (using '=', still experimental)

The full change log is available here for the curious ones.

Email signup no longer required

When we first launched Alfred, we didn't include a way to check for updates. For that reason, we required users to sign up with an email address so that we could email everyone with updates. As a result of adding an automatic update checker, we're able to make email sign up optional.

We'll be sharing news and tips on Twitter and via our newsletter, so be sure to sign up if you want to stay in touch.

What's Next?

In the next release, we'll be focusing on further improving relevancy of searches as well as adding/improving web searches. We have dozens of tickets lined up, taking into account nearly all of the feedback we've received from users in the past few weeks.

We'll be slowing the pace down ever so slightly as we've been spending every spare hour on Alfred recently and need to catch our breath before tackling the next release.

In summary, we've loved every moment of developing Alfred and these past few weeks have reinforced our plans to continue developing great Mac software for the years to come.

Get the latest version on http://alfredapp.com, have a play and let us know on Twitter how you're finding it!

[Note: See the Change log in the Help section for the full detailed change log updates]

Version 0.5 Release Notes

New features:

• Dictionary "Spell" and "Define"
• Basic calculator
• Google's I'm feeling lucky added with keyword "lucky" (this will be improved in the future)
• Wolfram Alpha added to the standard web searchers with keyword "wolfram"
• Google translation added with keyword "translate" - Translates both sentences and websites
• Added Flickr search with keyword "flickr"
• Added Ask.com with keyword "ask"
• Spotlight Comments - you can set a comment of "ff" for Firefox and Alfred will find it

Preferences:

• Improved hotkey selection field
• Ability to change keywords for web searches
• Ability to disable unwanted websites from results
• Option to prioritise items with Spotlight Comments at the top
• Preference to save window position
• Option to always show subtext under results if available
• Preference to turn off Alfred fade-in
• Added a "Reindex" button to the experimental tab
• Ability to configure the "Esc" key behaviour
• Ability to disable "find" and "open" keywords
• Experimental feature to allow a comma as decimal separator (for locales such as Germany)
• Experimental feature to ignore the locale for Google and Wikipedia
• Option to choose how many results are shown
• Option to remove text at bottom of window

Improvements:

• Tweaks to the dark theme
• Correctly URL encode a + as %2b (which means things like Google calculator will now work)
• Locale system overhauled (need to re-set your locale)
• Remove the status bar icon before quitting so it doesn't leave a gap
• Special characters now shown correctly in hotkey field

Known issues:

• Iconography not updated in prefs due to time constraints
• Search relevance needs further improvements (main focus of next release)
• Help pages need to be populated in more details
• Spotlight Comments don't get prioritised above standard searches (eg. Spell...)

Known bugs:

• eBay URLs are incorrect
• Ampersand not encoded
• Address book: If launching a contact and there is a search in the contacts search field, the contact doesn't show
• Window positioning not remembered on first change, but remembered from 2nd move