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”.
But here Apple seems like they avoided that by buying the project instead of creating their own clone. Doesn't that make it nothing lime the Sherlock/Watson situation?
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.
