After so many years, I think I may have found my replacement for Quicksilver.

Say hello to Alfred.

After development for Quicksilver basically dried up, I tried to look for a replacement. Don’t get me wrong, Quicksilver has aged well and continues to do what it needs to do for me, but I figure that eventually there’s going to come a day that it becomes permanently incompatible with a major OS X build, and then I’m hosed.

I tried LaunchBar multiple times over the last couple of years and could never justify switching, both in terms of usability (for me) and price.

Then, lo and behold a tweet from Todd Dominey dropped ol’ Alfred in my lap.

I’ve only had it on my machine for a couple of hours, but there’s already a lot to like. The search seems to be a little more intelligent out of the box and allows you to filter out a lot of file system noise that I would occasionally get with Quicksilver. And, of course, there are built-in context searches on things such as Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia etc. that put Alfred leaps and bounds beyond Quicksilver in terms of search functionality.

I’m not without a couple of niggles from the start. The one feature I found immediately missing was the ability to map frequently used shortcuts to keystrokes. I had a bunch of network connections mapped to two character codes. I lost that in Alfred and it hurts that it’s not there. I’ll definitely be putting in a feature request.

Other than that, it’s pretty solid. I’d suggest giving it a try if you’re a Quicksilver user that’s feeling like you might at least need to know what options are available to you.