'Alfred' Turns Your iPhone Or iPad Into A Helpful Remote For Your Mac

When most people sit down at their desk to get some work done, their iPhone or iPad gets tossed on the desk and forgotten.

Alfred Remote is a productivity app that wants to change that: It helps you get some extra use out of your iPhone or iPad by turning it into a remote for your Mac.

Want to open an app without clicking your way through Finder or searching for it via Spotlight? With Alfred, you have easy access to your Mac's dock of apps - all from your phone or tablet. And that's only the beginning.

You can also set up Alfred to play, pause, and adjust the volume of your music. You can lock, sleep, or shut down your Mac via your phone as you walk out the door.

Other use cases include launching your favorite websites, pasting clipboard snippets of text, controlling Spotify, sending things to Evernote, and plenty of other time-saving actions through creating your own custom workflow.

Alfred Remote relies on the already existing Alfred 2 Mac app, which is basically like a souped-up version of Apple's Spotlight search. You'll need to download Alfred 2 (available for free right here) in order for your Mac to be able to talk to Alfred Remote, but Alfred 2 is where you can create your own custom workflow actions that string together a series of actions, allowing you to save time by creating shortcuts that carry out larger tasks.

While some of the actions of Alfred Remote are likely easier by using the keys already existing on your keyboard (like volume control), Alfred is a great tool for power users to cut down on clicks and keep their most-used commands ready at their fingertips.

You can download Alfred Remote for $4.99 here, and Alfred 2 (the Mac half of the equation) for free right here.