BTW, the funniest thing I learned in the Newsweek article was that David temps as a fact checker for Martha Stewart.
comment []  trackback []  6:37:34 PM    

I'm hardly the first to make note of this event. Ken Bereskin mentioned it in his weblog on November 13th. It is exciting, nevertheless, and worth mentioning.

I thought Sherlock 2 was pretty cool. Sherlock was the search app. for MacOS. It searched your hard disk, the Internet, LDAP, etc. Sherlock's Internet search supported plug-ins to search engines. As a matter of fact, the Sherlock 2 plug-in format is the basis for custom searching in Mozilla and Mozilla-based browsers.

With MacOS X 10.2 (Jaguar), Apple has shipped Sherlock 3 and transformed Sherlock from a search tool to a more general-purpose "web services" tool. (FWIW, searching your hard disk is now built into the Finder.) That transformation was exciting, but until now, the new Sherlock has been a closed system. Now that the SDK is out, I hope we'll see some useful plug-ins. I've been working on a Fedex package tracker. (Click here to load it into Sherlock. [You must be running MacOS X 10.2 or greater.]) If you're in Canada, you might be interested in Victor Ng's Canada 411 plug-in.

P.S. I'll have more on my experience building a Sherlock 3 plug-in, later, but the one tip I will pass along, now, is to make use of Apple's sherlock-channel-development mailing list. I could have saved so much time messing with little annoyances, if I had.
comment []  trackback []  1:19:42 PM    

Couldn't keep plumbing its shallows for too long, but, despite little PSA-like entries such as this:

Wow, I can't believe how many people showed up for that Women's Cancer Walk. Very cool.

I have to say that this is, overall, an appalling display of how aggressively our children are being marketed to. I won't belabor the unnatural body image that these "blogs" glamorize, the rampant consumerism, etc. However, if you have a child--particularly a little girl--take a look.
comment []  trackback []  4:04:02 AM