| 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”. 1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) |
