Every app or service you use adds complexity to your workflow and requires context switching, which affects your productivity. Controlling everything from one UI sounds ideal, but where will you find an app that integrates all these services and lets you do what you need using simple commands? Well, right here.

Raycast might be the answer to all your problems, or at least those mentioned above. It works similarly to Alfred and Spotlight, while offering additional third-party integrations and in-depth functionality for each service. It can be accessed with a single hotkey and supports extensive customization.

In short, a LOT. Just like Spotlight, it allows you to launch apps and search for local files from a simple command box accessed with ⌥Space (the shortcut is customizable). You can also perform unit conversions, solve equations, and trigger web searches.

Unlike Spotlight, Raycast can be further enhanced by enabling integration with the many third-party services that are supported, such as GitHub, G Suite, Zoom, Asana, Jira, and Linear. Once connected, you will be able to perform a wide range of actions directly from the desktop.

While executing a command and bringing up a service's web UI in a browser is easy enough, it wouldn't do much to help your productivity. Thanks to Raycast's built-in extensions, most operations can be done directly from the app's UI.

For instance, you can find, create, and view GitHub issues, manage pull requests, schedule Zoom meetings, and search for files on Google Drive, all without switching to a browser. Of course, not everything can be handled from the desktop, but it's an improvement.

Navigation is very straightforward, and you can press ⌘K to view all available actions for a certain entry. You can mark commands as favorites to keep them on top for easy access, and global keyboard shortcuts can be set up for any of them. The extensions themselves can be configured depending on which commands you need to have available.

And to top it all off, if you find that there is something you can't do with Raycast, script commands allow you to launch custom workflows from the search box or using hotkeys. If you need assistance or inspiration, check out the Script Commands repository on GitHub.

Bottom line — Raycast is a remarkable tool that can replace Spotlight and other command-based productivity apps, while also packing additional functionality into a single native Mac app. It's all the more impressive considering this is still a Beta version, which will be completely free until a stable release comes along.

What's New:

Version 1.71.0:

More AI Models:

• Today, we're adding seven new models to Raycast AI. You can use these models in Quick AI, AI Commands, or our recently revamped AI Chat, which features a brand-new sidebar. This addition makes Raycast ideal to experience AI on your Mac - one interface, many models.
• Pick from the following models:
• OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 Turbo (no support for vision yet), or GPT-4
• Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku, Sonnet* or Opus*
• Perplexity Sonar Small or Sonar Medium*
• Mistral Mixtral 8x7B or Llama 2 70B, powered by Groq
• Meta Code Llama 70B

New:

• You can now duplicate built-in AI Commands to tweak them however you want
• Added a new built-in AI Command to ask a question about a website (requires the Browser Extension)

Improvements:

• Improved built-in AI Commands to follow instructions more closely and maintain the language of the original text
• Improved icons for creativity in AI Chat and AI Commands
• Improved Snippets to support export to a JSON file
• Improved the parser for Dynamic Placeholders. It is twice as fast and allow you to escape characters in options’ values like {argument options="foo,bar,baz"} or {argument options="foo,bar"baz"}
• Added an action to edit a Siri Shortcut

Fixes:

• Fixed Version History inline code background not being drawn in extension’s changelog
• Fixed source of Clipboard History items coming from Handoff
• Fixed an issue where editing a snippet that contained links would remove the links

Screenshots:

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