This 4-in-1 smart home appliance is the only butler you need

Quarantine has really shown me that I could never be a butler should I ever plan to switch careers, in fact, I could use a butler to manage all the chores as I work from home. This is the part where I fall in love with Mr. Alfred – no, not Batman’s butler but a smart home appliance that serves as a humidifier, dehumidifier, air purifier, and vacuum. I think this confirms that all men are truly not the same!

Mr. Alfred is a conceptual smart air-management system that looks like an elegant bar cart – the gold rails add a retro finish while the muted grey body gives it rich yet subtle aesthetic. Instead of having four home appliances, you can just have one that does it all while saving space and upgrading your interior game. Mr. Alfred is designed to provide solutions for healthy air in your space by sensing the quality. It is precise and targeted at keeping your space clean. The sleek appliance is made of six important parts – the main body which is responsible to store and charge the detachable parts, a drone that monitors the space, a robot vacuum, an air purifier, humidifier, and dehumidifier. Fun fact: the three air-management parts rest on the robot vacuum that makes them portable.

The rails of the main body help with putting the air-purifier, humidifier, and dehumidifier on the robot vacuum when being used. After the job is done, all parts return to the main body to be stored and recharged. Mr. Alfred also includes a cleaning tool kit with brushes and sprays. The physical form of a trolley was used to match the image of a butler. The wheels make it easy to move around the house and the minimal style lets it become a beautiful furniture piece when not in use. Mr. Alfred has been an iconic butler forever and now it lives in the form of this smart concept design…now only if it also had a feature to shine a symbol in the sky.

Designer: Dawn BYSJ, S-W K, Ki-Beom Hwang, Dong-Jun and Citrine H

Google’s Alfred service shutting down on July 19th

Google's Alfred service shutting down on July 19th

Google's not done shuttering wares this month, apparently, as the local recommendation service Alfred is headed for the digital cemetery on July 19th. The app issued a warning to its users, spotted by TechCrunch, announcing its impending death and warning users to request data through the feedback tool should they wish to use it post-July 19th.

Mountain View purchased Clever Sense, the company that created Alfred, back in late 2011. The team responsible has since moved on, internally, to other projects (CEO Babak Pahlavan, for instance, is now part of Google's Analytics division). Apparently their baby couldn't escape Google's ever-looming axe, and it joins Latitude in the most recent round of service cuts.

Filed under: , ,

Comments

Source: TechCrunch

Alfred v2 brings Workflows, automates what Automator might not

Alfred v2 brings Workflows, automates what Automator might not

Anyone who's heavily invested in the Mac ecosystem knows Automator, a built-in tool that can string together multiple computing actions without having to know a lick of code. Some of us may want a little more power, or just a different variety of power -- which is where the recently launched Alfred 2.0 comes in. Those who buy the £15 ($23) Powerpack can take advantage of Workflows, which relies on an Automator-like concept of linking simple actions to run complicated tasks. They can be more ornate than you'd expect, however: for a start, you can run multiple app-specific tasks in parallel, such as telling Chrome to search YouTube, IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes the moment you type in a movie keyword. It's equally possible to feed results back to Alfred, launch scripts and trigger notifications (whether Mountain Lion's or Growl's), among other feats. Should you demand control that sits just outside of Apple's boundaries, Alfred is waiting at the source link; anyone who just wants its core launcher functionality can grab the app for free.

Filed under: ,

Comments

Via: The Verge

Source: Alfred