I have done some thinking about Sherlock. For me it seems like the software is only halfway done. There is one big difference between OSX and Windows. Apple make small specific apps for one purpose. Windows make large battleships that tries to do everything. In this sense Sherlock acts like a Windows app.
So what should be done? Kill it but keep the good things. Sherlock is good at retrieving information from the Internet, but it's not so good when it comes to displaying it. So my suggestion is to convert sherlock into a framework or a background application. Let then different applications use the Sherlock plugins to extract information from the net.
What would this be good for? I thought about this when I completed addresses and phone numbers in Addressbook. I live in Sweden and here most of the addresses and phone numbers can be fetched from gulasidorna.se (our yellow pages). If my idea comes true I could make my own Sherlock plugin and then hook it to the "Sherlock aware" Address book. I could then look up the information from within Address book. If the "find on map" in the same application worked in the same way I could myself direct the task to gulasidorna.se instead of the site it's pointing to now. Another idea would be a banking app that uses a customizable Sherlock plugin to login and get information from my Internet bank.
What do you think?
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