#TrentRecommends

My first post of 2012 is dedicated to easily the best app I discovered last year. Alfred.

What can’t alfred do? I’m still finding new tricks and tips on a weekly basis and I started using him in July 2011.

What I love most about Alfred is the powerpack iTunes features that let you search for tracks, albums, artists or playlists so quickly and easily that I feel Alfred should actually be built into OSX. It’s that good.

If you’re going to try anything new in 2012 - I highly recommends trying Alfred.

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Whether it’s maps, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, you can feed your web addiction quicker than ever before.

Instagram the photo sharing App for iPhone is great, I love using it and I love looking at all the interesting photo’s people are taking all over the world and seeing things I never knew existed in my own city.

I however am not a fan of using the Instagram App itself to view other peoples photo’s. I generally use that app to just take the photo’s.

This is where Instadeck comes in handy. It’s a desktop app where I can ‘love’ or comment on photo’s. Read the comments on my own photo’s and respond back to followers. I can save images to my hard drive or share them using the links.

I can also set up users as favourites which I do with my close friends so I don’t miss anything they’ve posted.

Also it’s so nice to just be able to see the photo’s at a larger size than my iPhone screen.

I’ve had so many questions about iTunes Match and I’ve had trouble finding the exact answers I was looking for. That is until I found this article. It covers every question I had in relation to the vast amount of tracks (not in any iTunes store) and quality of tracks I store in my iTunes.

I can safely say the only thing I need is a larger local hard drive in my MacBook.

While I do recommend you read this article, using iTunes Match will not provide the advertised experience for all it’s users.

iTunes Match isn’t for audiophiles, music lovers, or anyone for that matter. iTunes Match and iCloud are Dead On Arrival just as Google Music and Amazon’s Cloud Drive were back in May 2011. Apple is a day late and a dollar short with iTunes Match and iCloud.

Treat it like an exclusive Facebook account that you only share with your closest friends.

I love anything Growl related! Grab it while it’s on special Mac users.