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This isn't the first time Apple's apparently screwed over developers.

Panic made a better music player:
http://panic.com/audion/
http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

Widgets didn't originate with Apple (at least according to Arlo Rose):
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=77382
http://www.konfabulator.com/cartoon/partOne.html
Alternative view here - http://www.randommaccess.com/articles/1088610260.shtml

Watson was slain:
http://www.karelia.com/watson/

iPodRip bullied into submission:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/biz-tech/jobs-may-make-mat-lose-his-job-20091125-jq6t.html

My only observation? Over time, anything that dilutes or threatens the iTunes/App Store/iDevice ecosystem is met with increasingly over-the-top responses.

Maybe that's how you get ahead in business, but it sucks nonetheless.

Photoshop would be replaced by Acorn, which would get a bunch of resources dumped on it. Illustrator is replaced by Inkscape. Quark Xpress makes a comeback to replace InDesign. Apple iWeb, Softpress or Karelia Sandvox or someone steps up to the plate to replace Dreamweaver. Fireworks is replaced with DrawIt. And Flash is replaced by Anime Studio or something. In any case, there's a great number of companies that would be ready to jump into the fray should Adobe choose to pull out of the Mac market.

Sun's history and reputation on the Mac with things not related to the JVM is pretty awful. This has as much of a chance of seeing the light of day in a usable format as their version of Watson. Give it a year and by then Sun will have 'realigned their priorities' via reorg or a RIF will have wiped out the group that is working on this.

It is well-known history. Xerox parc was not open to the public. The work going on there was secret. Apple's visits there were paid for in stock. Apple paid a lot of money in the form of stock for the privilege of viewing the inner-workings of Xerox parc. I'll keep repeating it but you have Google, dumbass.

If you think the moniker inappropriate, tell me what website is the first listed in the above Google search? Tell me, oh wise dragon.

Btw, you totally got the timeline wrong on Watson. Sherlock inspired it, not the other way around:

Q. What is the relationship between Watson and Sherlock 3?

A. When Watson -- openly inspired by Sherlock for the concept of bypassing the Web browser -- was first released in 2001, it was envisioned as Sherlock's "companion" application, focusing on Web "services" rather than being a "search" tool like Sherlock.

Widgets have their hereditary line going back to Apple's original Mac OS with its Desk Accessories, which were designed to be run from their own menu and within the System space (i.e., not as separate applications). If anything, the argument can be made Konfabulator ripped off Apple. And none of Apple's sharing has been anything like Microsoft's code theft vis a vis Stacker/Doublespace. Perhaps theft is too strong a word? Well, we are all entitled to our own opinion. Just make sure you have some facts to back up yours.

Well, the guy of Watson fame (or is it scandal?) seems to be working on something promising. It's called Sandvox and it should be full of Cocoa-y goodness. I've been meaning to get in contact with him and see if it would be possible for it to include "Site management" features that are compatable with Dreamweaver, ie. check-outs/check-ins, resource lists, etc.

Then I could use that to manage sites. Honestly, who let Macromedia near a compiler? (Or interface design tool?)

There's a very interesting post on kottke.org that discusses online applications in relation to weblogs. I quote:

Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr's authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner "listen" for new content from all those sources,
transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.

When I made the switch from QWERTY to Dvorak, it took me about 2 weeks of painfully slow typing while a did some basic drills. (ABCD by Dan Wood)I didi this all on a QWERTY-labelled keyboard, with the layout changed in software. Basically, I learned to touch-type in Dvorak where before I was a really fast hunt-and-peck typist on QWERTY.

I still have to use QWERTY layouts on occasion, and much like languages, it's a bit rusty if I'm out of practice but it comes back pretty quickly if I need it. Plus, they keycap labels are actually helpful.

Anecdotally, my hand and wrist comfort are much greater now than when I used QWERTY all the time. Also, my overall typing speed and accuracy have improved greatly.

Heh, and the Konfabulator people, Watson folks, et al., might've something to contribute to that discussion as well.

Offtopic, and I know I'll be modded down as fast as possible, but for anyone who hasn't heard, Apple Inc. have ripped off another developer. Not content with ripping off Watson, they've now stolen the features for another product without proper recompense and included it in their "Tiger" OS. Read the story here.

You know, I remember when Apple used to come up with their own GUI innovations. At least Microsoft tends to buy the companies whose technology it wants, Apple is fast becoming worse even thean them. A hideous creature behind a smiling mask, indeed.

Bad karma from mixing with Apple fanboys. Please, set aside your zealotry and mod fairly for once.

Copycats. Get it? They're all cats, and they get copied. (Or copy other things, in a couple cases. See? It's a double entendre. Or something.

Go ahead and mod me 'Flamebait', but some of the new features very strongly resemble applications written by independent developers. Dashboard? Meet Konfabulator. Spotlight? Meet Launchbar. Safari's new RSS feature? Meet NetNewsWire. IIRC, Apple did the same thing involving Watson when it added channels to Sherlock.

Maybe this is why Apple distributes the Developer Tools free of charge; so they can coopt any product that is created using those Developer Tools?

it looks like apple's giving konfabulator the same treatment with dashboard as they gave soundjam with itunes, watson with sherlock... i don't get it. on one hand, they're bringing their developers closer with all these great development tools-- XCode 2.0's OO diagramming features look very sweet as well as the Java tools-- but they have the gall to blatantly steal the finest fruits of the third-party developers' labors?

Complete fabrication. Believe it if you can't bring yourself to believe Apple would rip anyone off, but it is nonsense. Check out this FAQ.

Does it sound likely to you?? That a small developer would have an inside track on what Apple were up to that much earlier? That they would have such detailed info as to duplicate the look and feel so thoroughly?? Wake up my friend. This journal also put it nicely.

~SO

I dragged it back becasuew eyeTV uses it,

If you want to get away from IE, you can use Watson to set up your EyeTV program list.

Sherlock never really impressed me- until I tried the latest version

Wrong. Read the Watson FAQ.

Also on the Mac, I've reversed the gamecast applet protocol that ESPN.com uses and created a Konfabulator widget that does the gamecast. There is NOTHING stopping you from doing the same thing (and it's much easier, assuming you're comfortable around packet sniffers and writting HTTP clients) for yahoo or gamecast.

Sujal

A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The owner provides the land, seed, and tools exchange for part of the crops and goods produced on the farm.

It's a lousy position to be in, because you're never going to make much, and if the land's owner finds something better to do with the land, you're history.

A practical example of this is Watson, the product mentioned above, which did very nicely, thank you, on the Macintosh, until the owner of the land brought out Sherlock, a very nice program that did many of the same things.

Are You a Sharecropper?
If you're developing software for the Windows platform, yes.
Or for the Apple platform, or the Oracle platform, or the SAP platform, or, well, any platform that is owned and operated by a company.

They own the ground you're building on, and if they decide they don't like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you're toast.
They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can't see; and they can break the published APIs you use.
All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.

How Not to be a Sharecropper

If you develop server-side software that runs on Unix (by which I mean any platform that runs bash and creates processes with fork(), which includes GNU/Linux, Solaris, AIX, and many others), you're not a sharecropper.

They're not 100% compatible, but they're enough alike that you can move around and nobody really owns the turf.

You're not a sharecropper if you're building around the Apache webserver and the increasingly-large suite of associated software.
Nobody owns it, and it runs on anything; nuff said.

You're not a sharecropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you're building on the Web platform.
If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you.

Good For the Customers, Too
It's pretty obvious that it's healthier not to be a sharecropper vendor. But a little thought shows that it's better not to be a customer on a sharecropper's platform.
When something good and new comes along, the chances are less that it'll be scooped and monopolized by the landlord, and greater that it'll develop into a healthy ecosystem.

But it's especially good for the customers to be on the Web platform.
The notion of routing everything through the browser (with one significant exception, which I'll discuss below) is incredibly user-centric, user-friendly, and user-empowering.

Because once they know how to use the "Back" button, to click on highlighted text, and to fill out a form, then they don't need much training in how to use your application.

Reactionaries
But there are those who want to break out of the browser mold and go back in

Even better, with Watson from Karelia Software, you can use EyeTV anywhere in the world (well, you neep the PAL version if the country uses that system). You can get TV listings from the Watson channel and automagically program EyeTV with just one click... It's great!...

I think you've hit it pretty close. Most of the comments on this article have been about bashing Flash in webpages, but few people picked up on the fact that the idea behind Macromedia Central is about building and distributing little internet connected apps that run in a shell on the desktop. The comparison to Apple's Sherlock and its better orginal seed, Watson, seems dead-on. The difference is that the apps built for Macromedia Central will be built in Flash (so they're cross-platform and run on more than MacOS) and Macromedia has built-in a commerce system so that the apps (apps...built by individual developers, not necessarily big companies with commerce infrastructure) are trival to post and sell online. Central provides a toolkit for building these apps that can plug into the Central shell, and will provide a central app distribution site where developers can post try-before-you-buy versions of their apps and Central users can easily browse for new apps.

If you haven't seen Watson take a look at the types of apps I'd expect to see being built for Central in the future.

http://www.karelia.com/watson/

My coworker (a Flash developer) said it best - "All it is is just Watson." This seems like a way to build small, single purpose apps that do small, single purpose things. Too bad they can't be chained together with | and > like Unix's small, single purpose apps.

This looks like Macromedia's version of Sherlock (or Watson).

Yes, that's correct. Although if they make a statement that they will not reveal my information and do so anyway, that's fraud.

Not letting people screen scrape isn't even something I'd consider a "price".

And how do you plan on enforcing this? Are you going to empower the government to hunt down all Watson users? It's like the War on Drugs: to me the inability to legally smoke pot isn't a cost, but the expense and violations of privacy and civil liberties required by enforcement are.

I know, it's tired, but it still annoys me.

Apple and Sherlock has done with the web what should be done for all applications: used http to send data but created a decent UI for online applications.

You really can't give Apple credit for this innovation. Sherlock is cool but it is really only copy of Watson.

I haven't done any Watson development, yet. (I'd like to give it a shot and compare it with Sherlock 3, when I get the time.) As noted above, Victor Ng has great notes on his experience with the SDK. As Victor notes, the most frustrating bit has to be the complete lack of feedback for even the simplest syntax errors. The developers of Watson have a brief, but informative comparison of the two SDKs, as well.

I haven't done any Watson development, yet. (I'd like to give it a shot and compare it with Sherlock 3, when I get the time.) As noted above, Victor Ng has great notes on his experience with the SDK. As Victor notes, the most frustrating bit has to be the complete lack of feedback for even the simplest syntax errors. The developers of Watson have a brief, but informative comparison of the two SDKs, as well.

I haven't done any Watson development, yet. (I'd like to give it a shot and compare it with Sherlock 3, when I get the time.) As noted above, Victor Ng has great notes on his experience with the SDK. As Victor notes, the most frustrating bit has to be the complete lack of feedback for even the simplest syntax errors. The developers of Watson have a brief, but informative comparison of the two SDKs, as well.

WATSON SHOULD SUE MAC COZ THEY RIPPED EM OFF!!!!1

Look, the company is called Karelia, not 'Watson'.

Yes, Apple almost certanly took a whole lot of ideas for Sherlock 3 from Watson, however Watson also was inspired by Sherlock 2.

Besides, Karelia may get their own back: they are pondering a Windows port.

WATSON SHOULD SUE MAC COZ THEY RIPPED EM OFF!!!!1

Look, the company is called Karelia, not 'Watson'.

Yes, Apple almost certanly took a whole lot of ideas for Sherlock 3 from Watson, however Watson also was inspired by Sherlock 2.

Besides, Karelia may get their own back: they are pondering a Windows port.

Unfortunately for Apple, Sherlock 3 is not quite up to par with Watson in terms of speed or functionality, so we're not that worried. And soon, we will release some more tools for Watson that will continue to make it the market leader in Web services.

Last but not least: If Apple wants to crush Karelia, why do they link to Watson in their Mac OS X - Downloads section?

> Quartz anti-aliasing for Carbon apps
About time. Anti-aliased fonts have only been in Windows and X for several years.

Quartz anti-aliasing, not just anti-aliasing in general. The Mac's had it before Windows. Quartz anti-aliasing is just better (than the Mac's old anti-aliasing system, as well as any others out there that I've seen).

And don't get me started on anti-aliasing in X. Sucks like Dick Cheney on an oxygen tank after a walk around the block.

> Sherlock 3
Is nothing more than a glorified search engine front-end. Try Google [google.com] or Teoma [teoma.com] instead

Actually, no, the major change from Sherlock 2 to Sherlock 3 was the integration of functionality from the shareware program Watson, which everyone who's used it agrees is an amazing time-saver (and it's unlike anything I've seen anywhere else, for whatever that's worth).

> IPv6 And this is usable... how? Unless you have an internet2 connection, but you're probably enlightened and running a genuine *BSD at that point.

A) Any student who pays tuition at a major university has an internet2 connection. And you can bet that 99% of them are not running *BSD (except those running OSX).

B) Anyone who wants to can tunnel to IPv6; there are plenty of public gateways.

If we are looking for a new paradigm, perhaps we should examine Watson by Karellia and the new Sherlock 3 by Apple which is essentially a clone of Watson. These new paradigms of web browsing try to present information in the form which is best, rather than trying to sublimate it to whatever fractured HTML presents it on the Web. The result is a fast and efficient means to find exactly the information you need.

Maybe a next-gen GUI could use a similar idea and provide seamless ways to present the information you want to view or work with, without a desktop. Are you working on a text file? Automatically move into a word processor-like relationship. Are you viewing an image? Automatically move into a image viewing/manipulations relationship. If these different "relationships" could be placed into the OS in a way that they seamlessly interact, it might provide a way to interact with pure data, rather than simply shuffling around icons on a desktop.

Random idea. Course, if you were to do this right, it would require even more integration than Microsoft or Apple have done with their packaged apps. Every function would have to, in some way, be plugged into the OS. Is that better or worse than what we have now?

... I support Apple whole heartedly. I can understand why the .Mac venture began. But, what sickens me, recently, is none of the profit making methods they've been concocting. No, what bothers me is Sherlock 3. Obviously, the idea came from a company who once was a "privileged developer" of Apple's: Karelia . They made this amazing internet tool, called Watson, which does exactly what Sherlock 3 plans on doing. Apple stole their idea and has not, in any way, compensated them. I admire Apple, up to a point. But, pulling Microsoftian shit on a privileged developer does not bode well for me or for them.

These are big. These are very big.

There's nothing worse than transferring a friend's data from an old mail client, noticing a duplicate, and not being sure which address is current. Think of all the places where something as simple as an address or e-mail address may be duplicated: e-mail software at home and work, Palm/contact software at home and office, phone numbers in the cell phone, etc.. Being able to sync contacts between work and home via the Palm was a huge step, but even now if I have information in a mail client or a cell phone it's a pain to keep it synchronized.

Donald Norman complained about this effort to "set up" stuff in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design back in 1990, and this is the first time that I've seen an integrated solution to deal with this. Sure, things like my newsreader (MacSOUP) and mail client (PowerMail) will have to be modified to work with these, but this is totally sweet.

In a related matter, I'm totally psyched for iCal. Despite its lame name, this looks like it has the potential to replace my Palm desktop application (which took its own sweet time getting ported to OS X in the first place -- but as a longtime Mac user and former U.S. Robotics/3Com shareholder, I'm used to getting the shaft from Palm).

Now while I don't have a huge need to publish my calendar to millions of people or even within a large business, for several years I've been looking at something to simply allow my wife and I to compare Palm schedules so that we know what the other has planned before one of us tells others that we'd love to go to that party or movie. I guess we'd count as a small workgroup. Several Palm options exist, but they're all about US$50 and either require Windows (but of course the sites don't bother to say that until you're on the demo download page, do they?) or an Internet service that (a) I don't necessarily trust with my whole calendar, and (b) who knows when they're gonna go belly up. Being able to handle the whole thing behind my own firewall looks great.

In terms of the upgrade cost, I prefer to think of it this way: The upgrade is $129, but includes the features I've liked in the demo of the kick-ass application Watson ($29) in Sherlock, a workgroup-synchronizing Palm calendar (~$50), and a Unicode character palette (comparable to ~$9 shareware). So, as far as I'm concerned, the upgrade is really only about forty bucks, which while not free, offers enough cool features and improvements (multithreaded finder, finder search, spring-loaded folders, Quartz extreme) that I'm not too concerned. Heck, with iChat I might even turn into one of those instant message wankers.

First thing I thought about when I saw Sherlock 3 was Watson. Even Apple's Phil Schiller said how cool it was. I guess Apple thought it was so cool they would practically copy it!
Watson provides many more services than Sherlock 3, but it also costs $30.

(unfortunately in karelia's case, apple didn't buy them but instead remade their product)

Other shareware products/technologies apple bought: WindowShade, Internet Config.

The next version of Sherlock should be much more like Watson, i.e offer an Aqua interface to many web services. For this, a javascript engin will come in handy.

Allowing power users to target requests more efficiently is a boost to both sides here -- even if Google doesn't charge a nominal fee for this, the bandwidth savings could still put them ahead of where they would have been under a more traditional HTTP/HTML transaction. You phrase your comment in a very cynical way, but really this seems like a great thing to me. One of the biggest burdens in getting info from the web is having to manually scrape it out of a web browser (or muck around with say LWP and HTML parsers). With an API like this, we can see more applications such as Watson, that aggregate the data & cut through all the web crap that makes finding information tedious. This is where everything is going with SOAP, .NET, MONO, XML-RPC, and so on, and I for one am glad to see a great company like Google leading the way.

Or, better yet, learn dvorak. I know a quite a few people with carpal tonal problems that switched and quit having trouble. A couple of good links:

http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/
This site has a lot of general information about it.

http://www.karelia.com/abcd/
This is a really good tutorial that I used. I was able to switch in about three days.

I heard all kinds of good things about it so I made the switch about a year ago. I don't have CTS or any other disorder despite my heavy use of computers since about 2nd grade, and I decided I'd like to stave it off as long as possible. I also bought myself a MS Natural Keyboard Elite. I recommend it over the regular one, the keys are MUCH easier to press. And the 6 is on the right instead of the left side. ;)

Once I made the switch, I definitely noticed much less hand fatigure after a full day of typing. Somewhere (check out the dvorak links) I remember reading on an average typists' day, using the QWERTY keyboard, your fingers will travel about 7 miles as compared to DVORAK which measures in around 2. Enough to make me switch. Besides I type 20-30 wpm faster (average) now too, and I can easily measure over 100wpm if I try :)

Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard

A Basic Course in Dvorak

I switched in approximately a month, though I had a tough time because I couldn't completely wean myself from QWERTY (had to use other computers, etc). I hear if you switch cold turkey it goes much faster.

Finally, I only used resources I found on the web. Didn't cost me a penny :)

I found this tutorial nice, which I found by way of Dvorak International