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So, whatever happened to Sherlock?
- Thread starter Karvel
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I personally never found Sherlock to be all that helpful. SpotLight is taking it over. Spotlight as of now also have very limited functions, but with 10.5 we will see a damatic leep forward with it.
i think the usefulness of sherlock went away with the simplicity of dashboard. nearly everything you'd want in sherlock can be had with dashboard's widgets. and if i recall correctly, i think sherlock won't be making it back with leopard this fall. hence, the movies widget in dashboard (the only reason i ever used sherlock).
Sherlock was a good way to make the Internet more accessible to people who were unfamiliar with it or didn't dare venture into the depths of the World Wide Web. hence the eBay integration, searching for flights, translations, &c. all these things are now easy to find and use through regular use of a website and/or Dashboard.
at the bottom of the "Internet" tab, it reads: Content provided by About, Best Site 1st, looksmart, Lycos, and overture. this list is obviously out of date since Google has become the leader in Internet searching and Apple has partnered (somewhat) with both Google and Yahoo!. i think this exemplifies how outdated it has become.
it's obsolete due to improved technology and probably should not have even been included in Tiger, maybe even Panther.
at the bottom of the "Internet" tab, it reads: Content provided by About, Best Site 1st, looksmart, Lycos, and overture. this list is obviously out of date since Google has become the leader in Internet searching and Apple has partnered (somewhat) with both Google and Yahoo!. i think this exemplifies how outdated it has become.
it's obsolete due to improved technology and probably should not have even been included in Tiger, maybe even Panther.
Well at one point it was thought that he died at The Reichenbach Falls but he did return in a later story
Well, Sherlock may have been replaced with the "simplicity" of Dashboard, but widgets haven't replaced the usefulness of Sherlock.
For example, it takes two widgets AND Safari to even begin to duplicate Sherlock's Yellow Pages channel (now dead as a doornail), and even two widgets and a web browser don't do the job as well.
Count me as one who will miss Sherlock, and I think it's a shame Apple let it die on the vine. Nothing wrong with widgets, mind you, but the concept of aggregating content from multiple sources on the web (or otherwise) and being able to present all of it in a single window with a specific purpose in mind was - still is - a great idea. It just seems like there is plenty of potential for taking that concept to the next level.
Attempts at some of Sherlock's previous functionality are present in Dashboard, but it's almost always crippled compared to what Sherlock was capable of. Widgets are great for simple, one-shot functions, but anything greater than that and it's not a widget anymore.
Apple's forthcoming movie widget is probably the closest thing yet to duplicating one of Sherlock's channels and, at best, it's just the movie channel repackaged as a widget. It's not an improvment, or an evolution, or some new whizbang functionality. It's the same old thing Sherlock had years ago.
And it's not even here yet.
Well at one point it was thought that he died at The Reichenbach Falls but he did return in a later story
The perfect answer. I appreciated it, anyway.
One should say so, since it never was a backup solution.
I discovered Sherlock a relatively short time ago (a couple of months) while looking around my system for goodies (grapher!). My first impression was that it is amazing, but disheartening to see that it's become aged and fallen into disrepair. I'll miss it if it disappears with Leopard, but I could always copy it... but what's the point, it's in it's death throws, we don't even get movie posters or previews anymore... dashboard tries, but it "ain't got nothin'" on Sherlock
Other way round. Watson was developed as a companion to Sherlock which focussed on web services instead of the web as a whole.
Watson came first. A lot of us downloaded it at the time, and used it until Apple bundled a very similar service called Sherlock, which wasn't quite as good but was free. Plenty of discussion ensued about what seemed like Microsoft-esqe predatory behavior by Apple.
Why thank you, I'm glad somebody did
I hope I wasn't the only one who got it.
for whatr it's worth; according to wikipedia, Sherlock was first released with OS 8.5 in 1998 and Watson wasn't released until 2001
That doesn't sound right to me at all unless the early version of Sherlock did not have the functionality of Watson. I very distinctly recall a lot of people myself included being very impressed with Watson and thinking this is a product that Apple ought to buy. More research and memory flogging seems to be in order...
EDIT: The wikipedia article actually makes this clear. Sherlock did come out before Watson, but it did not have Wastson-like capabilities until version 3.0 was released, about a year after Watson was released.
EDIT2: The story as told by Watson's developer, Karelia. Scroll down to near the bottom of the page for the comparison between Sherlock 3.0 and Watson.