I’d forgotten how awesome Sherlock is

2007-05-27 16:53:24 -08:00

Compare this translation interface (what I’ve been using):

Babel Fish, with its small input textarea,
Babel Fish (in Camino, because none of my other browsers work with it)

to this one (what I should be using):

Sherlock, with its text fields that take up almost the entire window.

I used to hate Sherlock under Mac OS 9—I went so far as to custom-install Find File from Mac OS 8.5. But Sherlock under Mac OS X is pure awesome.

Now, if they kill it in a future OS version, I’ll be sad. And I may end up cherry-picking from the old OS disc again.

6 Responses to “I’d forgotten how awesome Sherlock is”

  1. Phil Says:

    Or you could use the dashboard widget?

  2. Peter Hosey Says:

    I’ve never liked Dashboard, just as I never liked Sherlock 2. In fact, Dashboard is worse—at least Sherlock 2 operated on the same UI layer as everything else.

    You can tell that I think of that as a drawback to Dashboard.

  3. ssp Says:

    I haven’t really used it but there is an app called Translation Service whose name is quite self-describing. That should give you the features you want without any annoying UI. I imagine it to be particularly useful when browsing the web thanks to Safari’s great ability to run Services on the selection in a web page.

  4. Peter Hosey Says:

    ssp: Translation Service looks handy. Unfortunately, I’d be using it in Mail, which doesn’t work properly with Services (it inserts the general pasteboard, rather than the service’s output pasteboard). I’d have to use the regular-application front end, which doesn’t look significantly different from Sherlock.

    All the same, a very nice find. Thanks!

  5. Simone Manganelli Says:

    Actually, I’ve found Dashboard’s separate UI layer to be much more desirable than the alternative. The only problem is that when you haven’t used Dashboard in a while, it can take up to 30 seconds to even appear, and then longer to let the widgets themselves to refresh. (BTW, I have filed a bug on this problem with Dashboard.)

    But I actually still prefer this flawed implementation to having widgets on my screen that I only use once in a while. There’s nothing in Dashboard that I need to see or have access to on a regular basis. So I really don’t want them taking up my screen real estate.

  6. Peter Hosey Says:

    But I actually still prefer this flawed implementation to having widgets on my screen that I only use once in a while. There’s nothing in Dashboard that I need to see or have access to on a regular basis. So I really don’t want them taking up my screen real estate.

    Perhaps. But Sherlock solves the same dilemma by being a real application: it’s running when I need it, because I’ve just launched it with a quick QS(shl), and not running when I don’t need it. And QS, being all-keyboard, is certainly faster than hitting a hotkey and then switching to the mouse to hit the Translation button.

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