Apple’s new Sherlock 3 appears to have borrowed heavily from Dan Wood’s award-winning shareware tool Watson. When I first saw Watson I wondered how long it would last before all the various web sites it was scraping data from sued Karelia into submission. Any number of commercial sites’ content was being extracted and displayed by Watson, without advertising and without presenting each site’s branded interfaces. While incredibly useful, it’s easy see how Watson could be seen as content theft. I could also see how it’s not really that much different from me recounting any number of things I read from various news sources. The “problem” with information is it exists solely for people to share it.

Still as a shareware developer I’m troubled by this. Apple has a history of not exactly supporting developers well, especially in comparison to the way Microsoft coddles anyone even remotely interested in Redmond’s technologies.

I’ve said before that authorship is more important than copyright, and I think the generally negative reaction on the web proves my point. A whole lot of people already know about Watson, partly because Apple has been touting it as a brilliant OS X software gem. Apple should have at least offered Karelia something for proof of concept, good will is a non-tangible and an accepted expense which is often reported on quarterly financial statements. It wouldn’t have cost Apple very much, and bad press jeopardizing developer confidence costs far more.

Besides the obligatory Metafilter discussion, Scot Hacker comments on O’Reilly net, a somewhat heated MacSlash discussion, MacinTouch links to the Karelia FAQ, and the pre-MacWorld comments on VersionTracker.com are kind of interesting. Here are some other notable reactions from various blogs:
Doc Searls,

Michael Angeles,
Mike Benedetto,
Oliver Breidenbach,
Sunil Doshi,
Aaron Swartz,
Shawn Medero and
Oliver Wrede.

Ultimately, it was crappy of Apple, but this is business. Competition is vital, and even though Sherlock has a massive infrastructure to support it’s development, Watson has a head-start. Many of Joe’s Filters duplicate things Apple offers with Final Cut Pro, but ultimately improves on a common concept. Effective retrieval of information is not something which can be copyrighted or patented (unbelievably, it probably can be patented). Watson built on something Sherlock did poorly. Now Sherlock has picked up a lot of what Watson was doing.

I registered a copy of Watson to protest Apple’s actions and to support an innovative software developer. Thankfully it’s a great application which I’ll use. I’m not going to make some absurd proclamation like “Delete Sherlock 3 from 10.2!” because I might not. We’ll see which one is actually better.

Between the Watson debacle and turning iTools into a pay service, I can’t remember the last time Apple made this many people angry.

Random email: This morning I received a letter from a woman asking about a problem playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein, which she’d bought for her husband. My immediate suspicion was an email address harvesting letter, where anyone who replies confirms a functioning address. However the headers (*@bellsouth.net) seemed real and there are two people listed in Georgia with this name. (Georgia is BellSouth’s most populous area) After a little poking around, I decided to take a chance, be an optimist and reply. Considering that Macworld put my primary email address online this month, it’s not like I’m expecting a spam-free mailbox.

I know next to nothing about troubleshooting PCs and haven’t played RtCW (though I did play Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple ][+ back 1981
). The error message she sent included the line “failed to find an appropriate PIXELFORMAT” which is probably how she found me since I’m the first English result on Google when searching for PIXELFORMAT. Apparently she’s not the only one with the problem. Maybe if Activision’s support pages were easier to find, answers like this would actually help their customers.

Even though I’m still quite a PHP novice, I’m fairly sure having “echo” and “print” statements in functions is a bad idea. A better idea is to use a return variable containing all the text which would be output by the echo/print statements. This allows for much more flexibility in working with the results of the function. Now if only more of the PHP books I bought had mentioned that…

Wow, I just got an email from Dave, he’s in Ulan Bataar, in Mongolia.

Earlier this evening: Cleaning the dishes, I put a pot in the sink and started filling it with hot water. In the meantime I clean the counter with the kitchen sponge. Then I run the sponge under the extremely hot water. The sponge absorbs the water for a second or two, then it hits my hand. “Yeow!” Hand removed from water stream, water turned off. Then, I squeeze the sponge out… “Yeow! $@^%!” The sponge, of course, was full of the extremely hot water. Ok, that was dumb, back to the dishes, the pot specifically which was just filled with excruciatingly hot water. Yep. Three strikes, I’m a moron.

“The pages were very prankish and immature. They were very poorly written, obviously phony news reports,” said USA Today spokesman Steve Anderson.

Sure, criticize their writing. They still made a mockery out of your web site’s security. But then what is he supposed to say?

It shouldn’t be too long before someone posts screenshots.