Whew! Watson 1.7 is out the door!
Yipee! The new version of Watson, 1.7, is officially out today. I know a lot of Watson users would have been expecting a 2.0 release, but the major update work has progressing slowly. The new bleeding-edge technology that I've been adapting from some Schema Research work is, well, still bleeding. So to keep the embers warm, I decided that an interim update was in order.
There are a bunch of enhancements in the application itself that should satisfy all the requests I've received for being able to configure your display fonts. Specifically the requests were always to make them larger, but I took a cue from NetNewsWire to provide a simple list of fonts and sizes to choose from. I even put in some sample "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." text, which I retrieved from -- would you believe it? -- one of several Web sites that generate the text for you. I also borrowed NetNewsWire's technique of opening URLs in the background, and I added a preference to disable the window that might occasionally pop up with news from the Karelia server, for those who find that more irritating than useful. Finally, I turned the text input fields across the suite of tools to combo boxes that remember your recent search terms.
I hope people like the new SiteSearch tool. When people talk to me about Sherlock 3, what is undershadowed by The Controversy is the fact that there were hundreds of plugins out there for searching sites, which people liked, that don't work in Jaguar! A lot of Sherlock's original purpose of "meta-searching" is no longer pertinent, thanks to Google, but the ability to search a targeted site conveniently was abandoned when Apple changed gears. Yet those plugins are still available out there in Web-land, and many of them actually still work ... not in Sherlock 3, though ... just in Watson, and, I think, Interarchy.
But rather than just emulate what the original Sherlock did, I've added some functionality. Certain sites (e.g. IMDB) allow you to specify with a popup menu which section of the site to search. On the SiteSearch tool, a second popup will contain those sections, when available. So the tool has about 20 built-in source sites, plus any other source files you download, plus any Sherlock 2 plugins you have as well. (Use the checkbox in the Settings Drawer to enable Sherlock importing.)
The SiteSearch tool has some other features that I'm really proud of. A last-minute addition is an auto-update feature that will help keep the source site description files up to date. All we have to do is upload a new version of a file that needs to be changed to the Karelia servers, and SiteSearch will seamlessly grab the new file after you next launch Watson. The other trick is drag-and-drop download and installation of new source files. Just drag a link from your browser onto the popup menu of sources in the tool. Taa-daa!
Long-time Watson users will note the resurgence of the Epicurious tool. We've worked out a deal with Terrence Talbot, its author, to bring it into the Watson family. (Back when I first saw Epicurious, it impressed me so much that I contracted Terry to write several Watson tools! He's an incredibly talented Cocoa developer.) This new version is a major rewrite, and adds a handy "bookmarks" tab to keep track of your favorite recipes.
As always, (but this time I have a weblog to mention it!) I'm indebted to Watson's beta-test community for helping to make each release work smoothly. This time around, I'm especially grateful to Wesley Ray Hall, not only for his bug reports, but for contributing a number of "source" files to include in the SiteSearch tool.