Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

A week after Watson 1.7 shipped, now 1.7.1 is out the door. This is primarily a maintenance update, fixing a couple of problems that couldn't be resolved with just tool updates (which don't require a new version of the application to be downloaded).

We added some additional options for working with the new "combo boxes" that are used for search inputs across the suite of tools. Many users had requested the ability to clear their search histories; there is now a menu (Watson ▷ Clear Searches) to do just that. There are also a couple of preferences for the combo boxes: how many items to remember, and whether or not to auto-complete as you type.

And based on several requests to "bring back" the ability to drag the preview image from the Epicurious tool onto your desktop or other programs (which had never been an advertised feature), dragging is back. But wait, there's more -- the preview images from Movies and PriceGrabber as well. (The feature was already available on the Amazon.com tool.)

You can drag the images to your desktop or other programs that accept graphics, like Preview or iTunes. You can also drag them into Spring and create "objects." (Spring Version 1.3 or greater is required for this; it's currently in public beta.) So now you can have recipe objects, movie objects, and objects representing products from either Amazon.com or PriceGrabber.com. What a hoot!

Download Watson, as usual, here.

Years ago, I ran across a Hypercard stack that contained an index of thousands of classical music melodies. I grew up in a house with classical music playing all the time, so I know a lot of the music, but I can't actually name more than a handful of pieces. I found this program to be invaluable!

But not many of us have HyperCard anymore, and I hated the idea of this great concept and database languishing. So I looked up the author of the system, Elbert G. Smith, who first started collecting records around 1940! First on 3 x 5 cards, then punched cards, then eventually HyperCard.

I got a hold of the latest database -- now at version 4.11 with over 13,000 entries -- and built a little Cocoa application around it. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles in this early version, but I wanted to make it available to others to elicit feedback and let people play with it. And it's freeware.

I've put the current version of the HyperCard stack online as well, in case anybody wants to make use of it. This version has not been available online until now.

Get the software here.