Alfred

What do you like best?

The free version is great. Alfred lets me quickly open web pages directly, and pass in parameters to websites with consistently structured URLs. For example, Salesforce URLs are generally structured similarly, which means that I can pass a Salesforce ID through Alfred and directly open that Salesforce page. This is true of other websites as well - I have had it set up for up to a dozen websites at various companies I have worked at. Also its built in calculator is more convenient to use than Spotlight. There is a bunch of additional functionality that comes with the paid version, but I haven't tried any of that out.

What do you dislike?

The parameter passing is slightly limited, and that is the thing I use it for the most. As an example, I can use it to pop up the Google Translate website and automatically translate something via Google Translate (ie "translate umbrella") but the language it automatically translates into is the default in Google Translate (in my case Spanish). It would be great to be able to pass multiple parameters (ie "translate umbrella into French") and have it automatically translate into French, instead of the default.

That said, I don't know if that changes with the paid version. The product itself is great, and if that is a paid feature I may eventually upgrade to the paid version.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The biggest benefit has been in being able to jump straight from data analysis into web sites (ie copy/pasting a SFDC ID to quickly jump to that account in SFDC). It also helps me quickly look things up on various different websites (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Twitter, Weather, etc).