If you’ve been tracking with me on Twitter over the past week you already know I’ve been working on a review of LaunchBar that has now grown to include a serious look at Alfred as well.
Last Tuesday I downloaded Alfred (and bought the Powerpack of course or it wouldn’t be a fair comparison against LaunchBar), and have been using it exclusively ever since for the sake of research. (If you’re going to really write about software you need to live with it for a while, you know?)
One of my favorite things about Alfred is its usage report. It’s a needless geeky feature that tells you how often you’re using the app each day and what your daily average usage is. Over the weekend the developer, Andrew Pepperrell, began work on improving the usage report to include how often you use the clipboard history and how often you use the app to control iTunes.
The added reporting has not yet been rolled out to the public, but it is a great example of something I’ve noticed about Andrew and the Alfred team: they are committed to making the best application launcher available for Mac OS X, and they sweat the details. I can’t say that I’m ready to give up LaunchBar (I’ve been using LB for almost two years and am quite fond of it), but that does not mean Alfred is anything less than a great app.