Today, I stumbled upon this – one of the very first Daring Fireball entries – iPhony, decrying a theoretical “Apple iPhone” product – to be built with OS X inside it, offering excellent control and syncing over your address book, internet browsing and maps and driving directions – as totally implausible. Five years, man. Five years.
Gruber wasn’t wrong at the time. A lot of stuff has happened in five years. Right about now it’s only been three years since the iPhone project even got started. One of the things you might have noticed was that Sherlock was, if you’ll forgive the pun, in the spotlight of the article. Prior to about 2003, Apple keynotes went like this: “Mac, Mac, Mac, Internet Explorer, Mac, Mac OS X, Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock, iMac, Sherlock”. Sherlock was a really big deal, and now it’s almost completely gone. (Sources tell me even that ‘almost’ is up for discussion.) It’s noticeably easier to get excited about playing music and editing photos and video than being able to search for stuff online, though.
They still do, except that it now has a hot-key and placement in the menu-bar. Oh, and they changed the name.
And all the find-stuff-that-isn’t-on-your-hard-disk functionality was split out into Dashboard. Merge them back together, and you have Sherlock.
By Peter Hosey · 2007.05.28 01:26
Since I was specifically talking about Sherlock the app, no.
By Jesper · 2007.05.28 05:13