6 ms·

What does Sherlocked mean?

by nish__ 3mo ago

xd1936 3mo ago
It's a reference to Sherlock (and later Spotlight) being added to macOS, rendering the previous third-party search-launcher tools obsolete.
- cavoirom 3mo ago
  Thank you, I learned it today. On the other side, some users replaced Sherlock (Spotlight) with Alfred.
  - MBCook 3mo ago
    I think the Sherlock thing was in the OS 8 or OS 9 days whereas Spotlight didn’t come around until sometime in macOS X, maybe 10.4 or so?
  - fastball 3mo ago
    And somewhere in there Quicksilver was pretty popular. And now in 2026 the main competition is Raycast. An evergreen space really.
julianozen 3mo ago
It means Apple (or big tech) has adopted/cloned your product basically killing your products ability to succeed In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson
- jrmg 3mo ago
  This makes it sound like Sherlock was named in response to Watson. It was the other way around. Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner. ‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc). Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete. In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”. 1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c62852ba221db215b66a1d942682130dd2e70f3c0e1ec1cc1.png https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  But here Apple seems like they avoided that by buying the project instead of creating their own clone. Doesn't that make it nothing lime the Sherlock/Watson situation?
  - MoonWalk 3mo ago
    Indeed, it seems like the honorable approach.
    - sneak 3mo ago
      Cloning features and UI in your own product is not dishonorable. Outcompeting someone who didn’t bake in a moat isn’t doing anything wrong, or Burger King and Wendy’s shouldn’t exist.
      - Onavo 3mo ago
        Well at least they didn't have their product managers reach out to "start a conversation" like Google and Microsoft's who then blatantly rip off the product later.
  - julianozen 3mo ago
    Parent comment said "Well I was thinking about making a competitor...." Response said "Working on an idea after it has been Sherlocked is a bold choice" Child comment asked what Sherlocked meant. I explained. Apple purchasing Swift Package Index is great. The Sherlocking above comment was in response to the suggesting that theyd create a project apple has already made first party
doodpants 3mo ago
https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  https://www.karelia.com/blog/the-long-story-behind-karel.html https://www.karelia.com/blog/the-long-story-behind-karel.htm... > An hour later, Steve Jobs called me. > "Here's how I see it," Jobs said — I'm loosely paraphrasing. > "You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That's Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks." > So basically the message was: get out of the way, kid; this is our market. Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own. https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html > If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. > And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
  - willtemperley 3mo ago
    > Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own. You're right of course and "The Other Road Ahead" was very prescient, but I think the desktop vs web-app divide is marginal nowadays, excepting one huge difference: desktop apps can offer a guarantee of privacy which browser based apps cannot. Note that a guarantee is just that, Apple offer privacy guarantees, but there is is of course no such thing as absolute privacy or security. It's perfectly possible to write desktop apps that are thin clients for web apps, so there's no real divide except where the code executes: in the browser sandbox, or in the OS sandbox. The current issue with desktop apps is mainly UI framework related. The browser based programming model has had so many resources thrown at it that somehow JavaScript and a bunch of divs is probably the best UI framework there is, and it pains me to say that.
  - stasomatic 3mo ago
    So SJ was right, right?

What does Sherlocked mean?

by nish__ 3mo ago

What does Sherlocked mean?

xd1936 3mo ago

It's a reference to Sherlock (and later Spotlight) being added to macOS, rendering the previous third-party search-launcher tools obsolete.

cavoirom 3mo ago
Thank you, I learned it today. On the other side, some users replaced Sherlock (Spotlight) with Alfred.
- MBCook 3mo ago
  I think the Sherlock thing was in the OS 8 or OS 9 days whereas Spotlight didn’t come around until sometime in macOS X, maybe 10.4 or so?
- fastball 3mo ago
  And somewhere in there Quicksilver was pretty popular. And now in 2026 the main competition is Raycast. An evergreen space really.

julianozen 3mo ago

It means Apple (or big tech) has adopted/cloned your product basically killing your products ability to succeed In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson

jrmg 3mo ago
This makes it sound like Sherlock was named in response to Watson. It was the other way around. Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner. ‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc). Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete. In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”. 1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c62852ba221db215b66a1d942682130dd2e70f3c0e1ec1cc1.png https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
embedding-shape 3mo ago
But here Apple seems like they avoided that by buying the project instead of creating their own clone. Doesn't that make it nothing lime the Sherlock/Watson situation?
- MoonWalk 3mo ago
  Indeed, it seems like the honorable approach.
  - sneak 3mo ago
    Cloning features and UI in your own product is not dishonorable. Outcompeting someone who didn’t bake in a moat isn’t doing anything wrong, or Burger King and Wendy’s shouldn’t exist.
    - Onavo 3mo ago
      Well at least they didn't have their product managers reach out to "start a conversation" like Google and Microsoft's who then blatantly rip off the product later.
- julianozen 3mo ago
  Parent comment said "Well I was thinking about making a competitor...." Response said "Working on an idea after it has been Sherlocked is a bold choice" Child comment asked what Sherlocked meant. I explained. Apple purchasing Swift Package Index is great. The Sherlocking above comment was in response to the suggesting that theyd create a project apple has already made first party

doodpants 3mo ago

https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained

matheusmoreira 3mo ago
https://www.karelia.com/blog/the-long-story-behind-karel.html https://www.karelia.com/blog/the-long-story-behind-karel.htm... > An hour later, Steve Jobs called me. > "Here's how I see it," Jobs said — I'm loosely paraphrasing. > "You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That's Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks." > So basically the message was: get out of the way, kid; this is our market. Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own. https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html https://www.paulgraham.com/road.html > If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. > And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
- willtemperley 3mo ago
  > Hope folks will always keep that in mind as they develop software for proprietary platforms they don't own. You're right of course and "The Other Road Ahead" was very prescient, but I think the desktop vs web-app divide is marginal nowadays, excepting one huge difference: desktop apps can offer a guarantee of privacy which browser based apps cannot. Note that a guarantee is just that, Apple offer privacy guarantees, but there is is of course no such thing as absolute privacy or security. It's perfectly possible to write desktop apps that are thin clients for web apps, so there's no real divide except where the code executes: in the browser sandbox, or in the OS sandbox. The current issue with desktop apps is mainly UI framework related. The browser based programming model has had so many resources thrown at it that somehow JavaScript and a bunch of divs is probably the best UI framework there is, and it pains me to say that.
- stasomatic 3mo ago
  So SJ was right, right?