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It's time to look at the latest iteration of macOS and get to grips with some of the new features and improvements. Whilst we covered lots of generic app features last week in the iOS/iPadOS 26 video, macOS has had it's own, personal touches. There is a significant improvement to Spotlight, with added functionality for launching actions, shortcuts as well as accessing your clipboard history. The menu bar is now fully customisable, and you can also create automations from Shortcuts that have the potential to impact your productivity for the better. There's a lot of new stuff to cover, and Lee walks you through the most significant changes in this bumper show.

Numi is a sleek, notepad-style calculator app for macOS designed to blend natural language with powerful calculation features. You can type expressions like “$20 in euro - 5%” or “today + 2 weeks,” and Numi instantly interprets and computes the result in a clear and elegant interface. It supports simultaneous multi-step calculations, unit and currency conversions, time-zone and date math, percentages., and maintains a history of your calculations in organized “notes,” making it both intuitive and efficient.

In this video, Lee walks you through some of the best features of Numi.

Numi runs on macOS 10.13 or newer.

After giving a thorough introduction on how to use both the free and Powerpack-driven versions of Alfred, Lee takes a deeper dive into building customised workflows. In this video, you learn how to build simple Keyword and List Filter workflows, understand how arguments and variables work and break down a complex workflow into its component parts, allowing you to better grasp each one.

At the end of the show, Lee shows his most-used workflows that can be obtained directly from the Alfred Gallery, including some on popular applications like DEVONthink, OmniFocus, and Obsidian.

Alfred requires macOS 10.14 or newer.

In last week's show, Lee walked you through the features available with the free version of Alfred. This week, he takes it up a notch by showing what you can do with a purchase of the Powerpack. It both extends the free functionality as well as adds new features to an already rich application.

In this video, you'll learn how to use Alfred to navigate your folder structure, buffer files for actioning later, access Contact information, manage Music playback, integrate with 1Password as well as get started on building your own workflows to improve your productivty.

Alfred from Running with Crayons runs on macOS 10.14 and newer.

Pricing information for Powerpack

Alfred has been Lee's go-to app and file launcher since he first logged onto a Mac over 10 years ago.  During that time, it's continued to evolve with new features added on a regular basis. It can be a one-stop shop for creating automation workflows to make your Mac sing and dance, which can at times seem daunting.

For many of us though, the free version is more than enough to make you switch from, or use alongside Spotlight. Finding and opening files, creating custom web searches, and easily accessing many system settings is easy with Alfred.

In this video, Lee shows you how to make the most of this great utility without spending a dime (yet...).

There are third-party tools you can buy on macOS that provide dedicated clipboard management, however if you use Alfred with a Powerpack license, you may not realise that you already have the excellent Clipboard History feature. Lee shows you in this video how he uses it daily to copy and paste text, images, and files between locations using keyboard shortcuts, of course. You also learn how Alfred Snippets integrate with Clipboard History to make typing even more efficient.

Alfred runs on macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and newer.

With Version 5, Alfred released its own built-in gallery that allows you to download workflows from a centralised location. Prior to this, workflows needed to be sourced from GitHub repositories and other locations on the Internet. They still can be retrieved that way, however having a one-stop shop for finding tools that make your day-to-day tasks on macOS easier is a great feature.In this short video, Lee guides you through browsing the new Alfred Gallery, and goes through installing useful workflows such as a Thesaurus, and Currency Converter.

• Alfred requires macOS 10.14 or newer

Alfred coverage on ScreenCastsONLINE

Alfred - App Store

Alfred - Product Page

There are a number of different workflows that you can install with Alfred, the popular app launcher for macOS. However, one in particular has caught Lee's eye and he uses it on a daily basis to carry out currency conversions, date calculations, weight conversions and more. Calculate Anything is a versatile utility and in this video, Lee shows you how to install it, alongside the dependencies it requires to work. You also get a sneak peek into how the new Alfred Gallery will work when installing workflows.

We bring you something a bit different for the last show of 2022, as Don goes through his Top 10 apps for this past year, 5 on the Mac and 5 on iPhone. He shows you how each one integrates in his daily routine.

iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 have brought with them some much requested functionality: the use of Safari Extensions. Now that developers have had time to release products that leverage them, Lee covers how to enable them and walks through the use of three particular extensions that have caught his eye: 1Password, xSearch and Noir.

Alfred is one of the most popular launcher utilities on macOS and in version 4.5, a new feature was released that takes it to yet another level. Universal Actions allow Powerpack users to take text, URLs and files and carry out actions on them directly from a hotkey.

In this special Friday tip video, Lee shows you the basics of how to configure Universal Actions as well as how to use the built-in sample workflow.

This week, Lee walks through some of the improvements made to the popular Spotlight alternative for macOS - Alfred - which is now on Version 4.

In this video, you will be shown how to configure themes from scratch, run through the new preferences setup, look at new workflow utilities such as Conditional Utility and Split and much, much more.

We're revisiting Alfred 3 to take a closer look at Alfred Workflows. In show 0643, we showed you how to use the basic building blocks to construct your own Alfred workflows.

In this episode, Mike Schmitz will dive deeper into some specific examples of what's possible with Alfred Workflows using several simple scripting examples.

Alfred is a really powerful application, and in this episode Mike shows you how to tie things together and solve common problems on your Mac by using specific workflows. He'll also show you some more complex examples, and point you to some great online resources if you're looking for even more workflows as inspiration.

Alfred 3 is a powerful application launcher and general productivity app for the Mac that makes many common actions easier and more efficient. Alfred 3 brought new features and functionality, including a complete revamp of how Alfred handles workflows. Once you understand a few essential principles about how the basic building blocks fit together, Alfred's workflows become much easier to master.

In this episode, we dive deep into Alfred's new workflow format. We'll walk you through some of the example workflows in Alfred, show you how to build your own workflows from scratch, and explain how you can quickly and easily install workflows using online workflow directories.

The final part of the Alfred Remote for iOS series.

In this episode I look at how to configure the different types of actions in Alfred Remote, using the supplied Alfred Snippet samples, as well as how to access your Workflows in Alfred Remote.

Something different! How about a control pad for your Mac?

I've covered remote access solutions to control your Mac, but usually these are aimed at working from a remote location. Alfred Remote allows you to configure your iPad or iPhone to control your Mac locally.

Something different this week, a live episode of ScreenCastsOnline!

Direct from MacMania17, I've included one of the live sessions as this week's Mac show, covering a refresher on Alfred, as well as a look at 9 killer workflows to boost your productivity.

Take a look at the video page for a full list of links to the workflows.

The third and final (for now) part of the Alfred v2 Masterclass!

Alfred v2 has been re-written from the ground up to be faster, more efficient and easier to use.

This week, I finally take a look at the brand new workflows feature of Alfred v2, accessible via the optional Powerpack.

I think you'll be impressed!

Continuing on from last week, it's part 2 of an Alfred v2 Masterclass!

Alfred v2 has been re-written from the ground up to be faster, more efficient and easier to use.

According to the Alfred blog, less than 15% of Alfred v1′s code was reused and every feature has been carefully improved. In addition, they've added in some neat new features, including WorkFlow, a highly customisable replacement for Extensions and Hot Keys.

This week, I take a look at some of the changes to the built in features of Alfred v2 with the optional Powerpack.

Alfred v2 has just been released, and this week, it's part 1 of an Alfred v2 Masterclass!

Alfred v2 has been re-written from the ground up to be faster, more efficient and easier to use.

According to the Alfred blog, less than 15% of Alfred v1′s code was reused and every feature has been carefully improved. In addition, they've added in some neat new features, including WorkFlow, a highly customisable replacement for Extensions and Hot Keys.

This week, I start from scratch and take you through some of the basics of Alfred, cover some of the changes, and demonstrate how to customise Alfred's default behaviour.

Initially this started out as a standard macMontage show, but ended up covering a lot of the recent Alfred update.

The first part is a look at the new features introduced in Alfred 1.2, a fairly major update with some great integration with 1Password, and now support for large type.

I also include a peek behind the curtain to show you how I've configured my new Thunderbolt drive into multiple partitions, as well as the reasons why I did it, and how I manage them.

Finishing off with looking at running some AppleScripts in various ways to unmount partitions.

As promised, it's time to check out some of the more advanced features of Alfred, the superb application launcher and productivity enhancer from Running with Crayons. I covered the basic operations of the free version of Alfred in a previous show (SCO0325).

In this week's show, I take a look at some of the more advanced features, enabled by the installation of the optional PowerPack module.

One of the best ways you can improve your productivity is to learn lots of keyboard commands so that you can control your Mac, without having to take your hands off the keyboard. Or maybe you like what you see with the iPad and iPhone and decided to get a Mac?

This is the second part of a multi-part series to be spread out over the next month or two, to bring you up to speed on the basics of using a Mac.

This week, I start off by taking a look at the free version of Alfred (available via the Mac App Store) and see what basic functionality is included. If you've never used an application launcher before, you may be impressed with what's available "out of the box".