[GSixZero]

During the quick dashboard demo, Steve mentioned a widget that matches every sherlock channel. I guess that means sherlock is now officially dead?

[HOMBRESINIESTRO]

And so are probably Stickies and Calculator
... and iSync, btw, seems to go away, too, as there is this integrated syncing service now. So we have:

Sherlock �
Stickier �
Calculator �
iSync �

[sigamy]

I remember reading an article with the product manager for Dashboard and this exact topic came up. He basically skipped over it by saying that Sherlock is a great app and "we'll see where this all goes".

For me it doesn't matter. As long as I can get yellow pages to look up phone numbers and locations of Chinese food resturants I dont' care if it is Sherlock or Dashboard.

I hope to see more integration of these web/data aware widgets with other apps. I remember using MS Excel's Webquery to pull down stock data into an Excel file. This type of stuff would be cool.

[Stradlater]

Originally posted by GSixZero:
During the quick dashboard demo, Steve mentioned a widget that matches every sherlock channel. I guess that means sherlock is now officially dead?

Movie times?

[Zimphire]

Originally posted by Stradlater:
Movie times?

Yeah Sherlock gives you movie times.

[Krypton]

Originally posted by HOMBRESINIESTRO:

Calculator �

The Dashboard Calculator is pretty useless compared to the stand alone one (e.g. memory and scientific functions).

[xi_hyperon]

Originally posted by Krypton:
The Dashboard Calculator is pretty useless compared to the stand alone one (e.g. memory and scientific functions).

I bet a 3rd party will come out with something comparable, though. I'm liking what Apple's doing with Dashboard, but also looking forward to seeing other people widgets.

[Stradlater]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
Yeah Sherlock gives you movie times.

Re: topic...

I don't remember there being a movie times dashboard widget, though.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Stradlater:
Re: topic...

I don't remember there being a movie times dashboard widget, though.

They have never shown one. Personally that is all I use sherlock for.

[:dragonflypro:]

Still, with the service available from multiple places it is a matter of time before one is released by Apple or a 3P dev.

T

[Mediaman_12]

Being in the UK, I can only call the death of Sherlock, and it's replacement with the, supposedly far simpler to create Dashboard Widgets. There is virtually no sherlock channels available for UK services. All the things people say they use Sherlock for, have never had a UK version, no yellow pages, no Maps, no movie times. Widgets will be better as they don't rely on special web servers holding the pages and doing the 'work', most of the stuf sits on the local computer, with just the required info being lifted from existing internet sources. like the WeatherPop in my nav bar.
With them having a HTML base even if nobody creates Widgets for UK based data It couldn't be that difficult to mod the HTML to change the data source.

[Anand]

So apple kills off Watson with Sherlock and than kill Sherlock. For what purpose?

[jfinete]

The purpose is that Apple saw what could be done with classic MacOS Desk Accessories, a specialized web browser like Watson/Sherlock, and an applet runtime environment like Konfabulator, and decided to combine all three. And now we'll have something much better.

[cpac]

Originally posted by Anand:
So apple kills off Watson with Sherlock and than kill Sherlock. For what purpose?

conspiracy theory view: to kill of Konfabulator. Apple will not rest until it takes every company that has a neat idea and strangles it.

realistic view: sherlock was its own natural progression from local searching to internet based searching to specific information via internet searching, that it killed off watson is not terribly surprising, but watson still had more and better "channels" to it (e.g. package tracking) that aren't available for Sherlock. Once development of Dashboard started, it became clear that it could do everything sherlock could do, only better and more flexibly than sherlock does (especially since development of sherlock plug-ins never took off, but dashboard widgets seem to be *much* more popular).

[barney ntd]

Mediaman, I'm sorry you don't like my UK Shopping Channel (shameless plug)

Actually, there is one important feature of Sherlock that Dashboard doesn't have, which is HTML searching. Sherlock 3 channels use Javascript for processes and XQuery for extracting data from web pages. Dashboard widgets use Javascript in almost the same way, but there is no replacement for XQuery. This means that it is easy to write widgets for web services which return properly formatted data, but hard for those which return a web page of results that you have to search through for the relevant info.

Sherlock will probably die anyway, as too many channels will become widgets. Unless Apple adds some sort of query language, this will be a problem, because I don't see how to translate my channels without writing my own XQuery engine.

Barney

[voyageur]

Originally posted by xi_hyperon:
I bet a 3rd party will come out with something comparable, though. I'm liking what Apple's doing with Dashboard, but also looking forward to seeing other people widgets.

Karelia? They've hinted that they're working on something every since they sold Watson to Sun, who killed it.

I liked Watson's VersionTracker, Reference, Translation, Phone Number and TV listings channels. I liked Sherlock's Flight Tracker channel.

[slugslugslug]

I really missed Sherlock 2 after the Watson-esque Sherlock 3 came out. It made sense as a meta-search utility with a really simple interface and worked great combined with the file-search tool. I mean, as the name suggests, Watson was meant to be a companion to Sherlock, and Apple replaced Sherlock with something that was functionally Watson.

Anyway, I didn't use either much, after paying for Watson. Watson had more useful plugins, but I didn't think the interface worked well for many of them, whereas Sherlock had a little more flexibility in presenting info, but not so many plug-ins. In the end, I just used the web.

I'm looking forward to Dashboard. If it presents well-tailored interfaces to handy web services in the same place as handy mini-apps, I'm all over it.

buh-bye, Sherlock.

[Mediaman_12]

Originally posted by barney ntd:
Mediaman, I'm sorry you don't like my UK Shopping Channel (shameless plug)

Barney

In-fact your UK Shopping Channel was about the ONLY channel that used UK focused data. I even used it a few times, until a few webpage based services started to search a wider range of DVD sites.