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Non-Apple Sherlock 3 Channels?
AnamanFan queries: "I've been a bit curious about Sherlock 3 and the release of the Sherlock SDK. I wondered if there were any new channels out there, but my Googleing came up dry. There are a few nifty developer-related channels by Apple that feature an XPath Finder, as well as JavaScript, HTML, & XQuery interpreters, but I was wondering if anyone out there has made use of the SDK."
massinova has a sherlock 3 channel. i believe it was the first non-apple sherlock 3 channel. it was created months ago when the first version of the sherlock 3 sdk was posted, before it was pulled. check out the massinova extras.
I've looked at making a channel myself in the past few weeks, but the astonishing lack of a community of developers who would have any knowledge of what I was doing make me rethink things. I wonder if the lack of channels is in any way a subconscious boycott on behalf of Watson...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Wouldn't it be cool if... ...there was a Sherlock 3 Slashdot channel?
It wouldn't have to do with the fact that the SDK is probably the most convoluted, kludged thing I've seen in years. XQuery and Javascript? To gag...
Watson's Cocoa based SDK is much easier to code for.
I mean it's so fun that Apple hasn't even provided us with new channels. Watson is constantly being improved upon and getting new tools.
Political correctness is the newest form of slavery.
There are lots of comments on his trials with the new SDK as well.
You can find my own Canada411 Sherlock channel with GPL source at:
l oc kChannel.xml?action=add
source:
http://homepage.mac.com/vng1
channel:
sherlock://homepage.mac.com/vng1/Canada411/Sher
I highly suggest you go to the Apple Sherlock dev mailing list. You can find it at lists.apple.com
Well, there is a Google channel. Not very good, but it works.
whats so great about it? I'm not being sarcastic here, just curious. I visited the website but couldn't get any idea of what they are actually doing. The website is horrible. I had reservations the second I had to click on the big massinova image just to enter. There was nothing anywhere obvious stating what it is they do.
I completely agree that your last statement about there being nothing obvious about what it is they do needs to be addressed better on the website. This is the concept: A huge library of trance music set up as an online radio station run by listener requests. Imagine the tunes are slashdot comments and what gets played are the ones that get modded up (there is no modding down, it's simple; you like a song, you request it). You can also create favorites lists and retreive information about artists, albums, songs, etc. The user rating system allows you to view most popular songs, least popular songs, recently played, newly added, random, etc. Check out the Sherlock channel and you can see a much better layout (and an idea of what is to come). The fact that the information and functionality is exactly the same regardless what client/interface you use ("web service") is what makes the whole project very interesting. Automated, listener-controlled, online radio.
Have a look at dotmac's Sherlock Channel. It is very well done, as for the entire site by the way.
:-)
And while you are there, go see my pictures...
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 thought I'd give a review of the comments from this post:
The common agreement is the the SDK could stand more improvement.
The following are some of the channels that are available. Clicking will add them to your copy of Sherlock or link to the homepage of the channel:
Canada 411
Google (not officially from Google)
dotmac.info
massinova.com
Libplussa
FedEx Tracker (not officially from FedEx)
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
My bad.
If you are using Mozilla, then you might have to associate sherlock: with the Sherlock 3 app, just like you had to do with .cal files to iCal. I'm sure there's some super 1337 way of modifying the plist file, but I just started IE5.2, added it to the protocols preference and closed it. Mozilla picks those chnages up after quitting and re-opening the browser.
blarg.
I understand what you are saying about the limited language choices, but it is supposed to be a semi-limited product. If you are already using Perl and so forth why not simply have an application? Why embed it is Sherlock at all? You could whip up a front-end to the Perl with Obj-C and Interface Builder rather quickly.
Admittedly Perl has nice datamunging functions, however if you read the links, you'd see that Apple has provided numerous extensions to both JavaScript and XQuery. Things like data-match and so forth. Further if you must use Perl, simply write a CGI script and call it with your JavaScript or XQuery. It can get data from any URL, after all.