Discover new levels of productivity with Gaurav’s latest AppleVis podcast episode — the second installment in a three-part series all about the powerful Alfred app for macOS. Designed specifically for VoiceOver users, Alfred helps you speed up your workflow by letting you accomplish a wide range of tasks simply by typing—no need to navigate complicated menus or interfaces.
In this episode, Gaurav guides you through the essential Alfred settings, offering a clear, step-by-step tutorial to get you started. Learn how to boost your efficiency by customizing general preferences, setting up handy shortcuts, and managing permissions to unlock Alfred’s full potential.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- How to use Alfred’s accessibility features tailored for VoiceOver users
- Setting up shortcuts to replace default macOS tools like Spotlight
- Navigating and understanding Alfred’s general settings
- Utilizing Alfred’s powerful search tools, including personalized Google country subdomains
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes, where Gaurav will dive deeper into advanced features, workflows, and premium customization options. Unlock the full power of Alfred on your Mac and elevate your user experience with AppleVis.
Get Alfred on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/alfred/id405843582?mt=12
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Gaurav: Good morning, everyone. Or shall I say good day, depending on where you are in the world right now and what time you're listening to this recording. Today, I'm going to do a brief walkthrough of an application called Alfred. Alfred is a freemium application, which means you can download and use it for free. And there are many additional features you can add on if you were to purchase the premium pack for the application.
Gaurav: Now, Alfred is a very powerful tool with which you can do many, many, many actions on your Mac. And I would specifically say it's very useful for voiceover users because you don't have to mess around with complicated UI or screen elements. And you can do a lot of things just by typing. So in today's demonstration, I'm just going to show you the various
Gaurav: aspects and options in the Alfred settings and we shall get oriented with the settings and over time I will do more demonstrations and walkthroughs which dive deeper and deeper into the Alfred menus and settings and teach you how to use and understand them in various ways. So currently I'm on the Alfred settings and preferences page. I'm going to press V-O-F-N left arrow to get to the left most section of the page.
VoiceOver: Search preferences, blank, search text field.
Gaurav: So I'm on a search box. I'm going to press V or right arrow.
VoiceOver: Alfred sidebar. General tab selected. Alfred sidebar. Alfred sidebar. 5.5.
VoiceOver: Alfred sidebar. Search preference. Alfred in Alfred side.
Gaurav: I'm going to do VO shift down arrow to interact with the sidebar. And now I'm just going to use the arrow keys without the VO modifier to see what's in the Alfred sidebar.
VoiceOver: General tab selected.
Gaurav: So the first option is general. I'm going to hit down arrow.
VoiceOver: Features tab selected.
Gaurav: Features. Down arrow.
VoiceOver: Workflows tab selected.
Gaurav: Workflows. Down arrow.
VoiceOver: Appearance tab selected.
Gaurav: Down arrow.
VoiceOver: Remote tab. Advanced tab selected.
Gaurav: Down arrow.
VoiceOver: Power pack tab selected. Usage tab selected. Help tab selected. Update tab selected. General tab selected.
Gaurav: Okay, so we've seen all the different options available in the sidebar. I'm once again going to go through all of them and explain a little bit about each one. The first tab we're on is general. So I'm going to come out of the sidebar, VO shift up arrow.
VoiceOver: Out of Alfred sidebar.
Gaurav: I'm going to interact with the content of this options panel, VO right arrow.
Gaurav: This is the version of the application that I'm currently using. View right arrow. Start up.
VoiceOver: Launch Alfred at login. Check.
Gaurav: So I want Alfred to launch at login. That's checked. View right arrow.
VoiceOver: Quit Alfred. If selected, Alfred will still launch at login after using the quit Alfred button.
Gaurav: So I have this selected. Even if I quit Alfred, when I relaunch my Mac or relaunch Mac OS, Alfred will again launch at login.
VoiceOver: Alfred hot. Hot is command space. Select this field and type the hot you would like to use to show Alfred.
Gaurav: So in this field, I can type the keyboard shortcut, which I like to use to trigger Alfred. I've currently got it set as command plus space. I have deactivated the spotlight command. I can still activate spotlight using the Apple menu bar if I want to, but because Alfred does everything which spotlight does for me and much more, so I've completely replaced spotlight with Alfred by using command plus space as my
Gaurav: Trigger shortcut. And in this menu, you can set it as whatever you want for your own purposes. I'm going to V or right arrow again.
VoiceOver: Main hotel.
Gaurav: Where are you? India. Where are you? So in where are you? I've set my country as India. This lets Alfred know which websites to use when you use certain searches, which I'll explain later on in some future demonstrations.
VoiceOver: Use dot com for Google searches. Check.
Gaurav: So in Alfred, when we search for anything on our Mac, like we do on Spotlight, if Alfred is not able to find it on your Mac, it can also ask you if you would like to run a Google search. And currently this is set to use google.com. You can reset this to... use any other version of Google, Google.UK, Google.EU, Google.DE, I believe for Germany.
Gaurav: So depending on where you are in the world, you can reset this so that the default Google search that gets launched from within Alfred would be a specific subdomain of Google. I'm going to view right arrow again.
VoiceOver: This tells Alfred which websites to use for web searching such as Amazon.com or eBay.com. Permissions. Request permissions.
Gaurav: The permissions section and this button, request permissions, is required when you first launch Alfred, when you first install the application, because Alfred requires many permissions to be granted under the security and privacy tab in the Mac OS system settings. I'm going to continue to press V or right arrow.
VoiceOver: Alfred requires certain permissions to enable him to automate your Mac. This button will help you enable these permissions. button alfred newsletter your email subscribe for alfred updates tips and sneak peek button button website twitter
Gaurav: Okay, so we have now gone through all of the main features in the general tab under this Alfred settings. I'm going to VOFN left arrow again to come back to the leftmost part of the screen.
VoiceOver: Search preferences, blank, search text field.
Gaurav: VO right arrow.
VoiceOver: Alfred sidebar, general tab selected.
Gaurav: VO shift down arrow to interact with the sidebar.
VoiceOver: In Alfred sidebar, content is empty.
Gaurav: I'm on the General tab. I'm going to hit down arrow to go to the next Alfred Settings panel. I'm now in the Features tab. And I shall do a separate walkthrough of the Features tab because there are many, many options on this Features tab, which we will come back to later. I'm just going to down arrow again to show you the rest of the settings.
VoiceOver: Workflows.
Gaurav: This is a premium addition to Alfred, so you can only use it if you have the premium power pack.
VoiceOver: Appearance.
Gaurav: Over here, you can change the way Alfred looks and feels. If you are sighted, then you can make some changes and edits here.
VoiceOver: Remote tab selected.
Gaurav: Remote. This is something to do with the Alfred remote. I don't particularly use this part of the application. Advanced tab selected. Advanced. Here you can change some of the Alfred settings. Let's just take a peek in here. View up arrow to un-interact with the sidebar.
VoiceOver: Out of Alfred sidebar.
Gaurav: View right arrow.
VoiceOver: General and global tweaking of Alfred. Mostly because you won't be touching this stuff much and it doesn't fit elsewhere in Alfred's preferences wing. File slash apps. Clear application cache. Rebuild macOS metadata. Zero indents pop-up button. Applications are cached for the fastest possible response. The cache manages itself, but...
Gaurav: So here in the Advanced tab, you can clear the Alfred cache, etc. I would not recommend you to fiddle around with these settings. These are things that would just take care of themselves. So I'm going to get out of this. VOFN left arrow. VO right arrow. Interact with the sidebar.
VoiceOver: Down arrow.
Gaurav: PowerPack tab. This is where you would place your license key. You would insert your license key here if you were to purchase the Alfred PowerPack.
VoiceOver: Usage tab selected.
Gaurav: Usage tab. This is where there's a graph showing me how much I've used Alfred across different days, months, and years. Let's just see what this has. View shift up arrow to uninteract with the sidebar.
VoiceOver: View right arrow.
Gaurav: Since September 27, 2018, Alfred has been used 347,634 times.
VoiceOver: Average 158.4 times per day.
Gaurav: So you can see since September 2018, I've used Alfred more than 340,000 times, which is on average 158 times I've used Alfred per day. So you can see that it's quite a useful application for my purposes. I'm going to get back into the sidebar. V-O-F-N, left arrow.
VoiceOver: V-O, right arrow.
Gaurav: V-O, shift, down arrow to interact. I'm going to now press the down arrow.
VoiceOver: Help. Update tab selected.
Gaurav: And again, down arrow to get to the updates tab. This is where you could interact with the table and change the way that Alfred updates the application.
VoiceOver: General tab selected.
Gaurav: And now we're back to general. So that's it for this walkthrough so far. I'll do a separate walkthrough of the feature list, which we had earlier heard, which has just been the general tab on the Alfred setting sidebar. And we'll do a separate walkthrough of that because there are so many different options and features that you can configure that it would require a lot of time and patience to listen to and go through that. So stay tuned for that one. Thank you so much.