Alfred: TUAW Best of 2011 winner for Mac utility apps

The readers have spoken, and they've agreed -- Alfred, the awesome free app from Running With Crayons, is the winner of the TUAW Best of 2011 award for Mac utility apps.

Alfred is a veritable Swiss Army knife of an app. It's an application launcher, a quick web search tool, a calculator, a powerful shortcut manager, a spell checker, an iTunes controller, and more. The base app is available for free, with additional capabilities added through a £15 Powerpack.

Alfred was the favorite of 55.1 percent of the 1,407 respondents, capturing over four times the number of votes of Quicksilver. The second place utility was the colorful and useful DaisyDisk ($9.99), used to visualize what files are taking up an unusually large amount of space on your hard disk drive.

Our thanks to the TUAW readers who nominated their favorite Mac utility apps and then voted in the competition. Congratulations to Andrew Pepperrell and the rest of the Running With Crayons team on being the winner of this critical software category in the TUAW Best of 2011.