Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Tuesday, April 9, 2002
00:33 - We have a new champion... http://www.karelia.com/watson/	(top)
Watson was updated to version 1.5 recently. Yeah, big whoop, huh? Actually, kinda, yeah. See, Watson is in my humblest of opinions one of the coolest pieces of software ever to grace the world. Why? Well, because it's-- well, let's count the things it is: Yahoo column-view navigator Movie showtimes finder, trailer viewer, theater locator, poster viewer, and ticket-buying conduit eBay auction manager FedEx/UPS/USPS/Airborne Express package tracker Currency converter Image search tool TV listings guide and search tool O'Reilly "Meerkat" news browser VersionTracker portal Arriving Flight tracker Recipe search tool ZIP code search tool Phone number search tool ...And several other things. More tool modules are being added all the time, accreting themselves into your Watson application like asteroids clattering together in space to form a moon. Oh, and it's about 2MB. This is about the most elegant thing I've ever seen. It's just a framework-- written in pure Cocoa-- for all kinds of web-enabled tools which suck in data from all sorts of online databases and format them in grids and detail drawers. The Movies tool, for example, lets you navigate through the Mac OS X-style column view by either theater or movie title (after entering your ZIP code); when you select a movie, the drawer at the bottom shows you movie details, the promo poster, and the trailer video which you can watch right inline. There's also a "Buy Tickets" link right there where applicable. Because of the TV Listings tool, I now no longer need to deal with my AT&T Broadband on-screen guide system-- because Watson's is much faster and provides a whole lot more flexibility. After inputting my ZIP code and selecting my cable provider (it knows about all the local ones), I get to check off my favorite channels, and watch all the listings at once, clicking on each one to see the same show details that I get on the cable system. It has a search function, too, so I can see the next n showings of Invader ZIM. What else? Well, plenty. For one thing, the reason for the title of this post is that Watson-- well, let's just say that they've improved their icon. Oh, how they have improved it. This is the "installer" folder. Look at it. I mean, just look at it. The bag with the globe in it is the icon. (You simply drag it from there to your Applications folder.) The newspaper next to it is the Readme file. Before you jump to conclusions, no, Finder windows don't have live raytracing and 3D shading now; the newspaper icon is artificially shaded to fit in with the "streetlight" background image. And no, when you click on the bag and drag, you don't lift the shiny blue sphere out of the bag and and into the light. But damn-- is that not the coolest installer-folder presentation you have ever seen? Okay, maybe I'm just easily impressed. No, that's not it. This program just kicks ass. I've just sent in my $30-- if ever a shareware program deserved registration, Watson is it. This is what Sherlock should have been-- and what Sherlock probably would have been if Apple had sat down to redesign it from scratch using the Cocoa frameworks rather than simply porting the legacy Find utility. 2MB... damn. This is exactly what everybody's been hooting about with Cocoa all this time. This is going to become an indispensable part of my life, if I let it. Incidentally-- Chris, a dyed-in-the-wool Linux guy, saw me playing with Watson today. After watching me scoot around in the Movies tool for a minute or two, he said, "Okay, you're having far too much fun with your Mac. You need to give it to me now." Open web resources and interconnectivity. .NET, eat your heart out. Now if you'll excuse me, Watson has pointed out a number of movies that I've been meaning to see which are on at this very moment.