This makes it sound like Sherlock was named in response to Watson. It was the other way around.
Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner.
‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc).
Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete.
In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”.
This is a genuinely interesting topic, and as we say in the blog post:
> Together, we’re building a comprehensive package registry to serve the Swift community’s evolving needs.
The great thing about a registry is that it doesn't care where the original source is hosted. We will be moving away from that model completely as we work towards this.
Not optimistic here. While I'm glad the SPI guys are getting paid (that is, a full time job), Apple is pretty bad at open source and developer services both, and they explicitly call out developer identity as a future direction, which doesn't fill me with hope.
I tried to get a personal developer account (I'm already a developer through an organisation). The app required a Driver's license as the only accepted ID. I don't drive because I'm blind. They did a screen share and talked me through applying on the web site. It failed. They never gave a reason and ignored me when I asked for one. They just said
"Hello Robert,
Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.
Upon review, we have found that we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs.
You can still take advantage of great content using your Apple Account in Xcode to develop and test apps on your own device. Learn more about Xcode development.
I do apologise that I was not of more help to you in this situation but wish you the best of luck for the future.
"
They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.
Simply being open doesn't make them good open source projects. Luckily the SPI shouldn't need to conform to Apple's release schedule, and should operate mostly independently, so the worst aspects of Apple's open source projects will be less of an issue.
Even simpler, this is a "no Scotsman" scenario. Apple has unprecedented contempt for Open designs and software standards, even compared to the pitiful example that Microsoft and Google set.
Unlike them, Apple takes a stance of contravening the public good to emphasize lock-in. They refused USB-C for as long as possible to sell licensed serial connectors that their Macs didn't even use. They fought tooth-and-nail to politicize the free distribution of software when the EU wanted to enable sideloading. They abandoned open initiatives like Khronos, for no reason other than to screw over cross-platform developers. They give Safari special OS entitlements that they refuse to extend to competing mobile browsers, and then justify it as if they can't write a safe OS.
There is no company on planet Earth that goes this far to undermine FOSS. Apple is the fakest Scot.
Apple has something with Swift similar to what Google has with Go. The language has a lot of desirable features for server development very much like Go and Rust. Especially when compared to Java and C#.
It makes sense for them to build their services using Swift instead of something like Go and the Swift-on-server team has been doing a lot of work to get swift in a usable state on Linux. Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them for that.
My only problem with Swift is personal taste and experience. I tried it on linux few times (admittingly few years ago now) and generally I wasn't a fan. Go and Rust solve all the problems that Swift could have solved for me, so I didn't bother. But just like node got an entire class of developers into server side programming, Swift could be apples approach to get their iOS and MacOS developers a way to easily write server side code in swift as well
Easy and approachable sound pretty subjective to say the least; feature and syntax wise, Swift has become an absolute monster of a language. Rust's tooling and ecosystem are ahead and these points matter to me more than the raw syntax in the age of LLMs.
The same condition is still true as the first time I was told "Swift on Linux" is somehow a first class experience:
> Documentation for the standard library is presently hosted on the Apple Developer website.
Sure enough, by Apple policy, the documentation pretends no non-Apple platforms exist. What happens for an API which could be different if your system isn't fruit-flavoured? They don't care and won't talk about it.
Is the feature I need available for this Linux device? No idea, but it does work with watchOS and tvOS made by Apple...
> Is the feature I need available for this Linux device?
If it’s in Foundation, yes. Swift 6 on Apple OSes now (since a while ago actually) uses the same open-source foundation as Linux. If it’s a proprietary framework (e.g. TabularData), no. It’s simple.
For the rest, almost all Swift packages developed by Apple are fully compatible with Linux, and the documentation of said packages is usually explicit wrt. platform specifics, AFAIK.
Always great to see community members see success.