Mac OS 8.5 is cool and all, and we like Sherlock, the newly-revamped and newly-renamed version of Find File that is the focus of all the 8.5 hype. Searching the Internet right from Sherlock is a lot of fun, and it definitely saves time over traveling to separate search pages to enter your search criteria over and over again. And the plug-in architecture lets you add any Internet search engines to Sherlock just by writing or downloading a plug-in and dropping it into the right folder. However, there are some criticisms of Sherlock floating around out there that are definitely valid; many of these have been already addressed by third-party hacks, and we expect that Apple will fix other problems in its next release of Sherlock, which we'd guess will show up in January's Mac OS 8.6 update.

The most obvious feature that Apple inexplicably forgot to add to Sherlock was a method to organize search engine plug-ins into sets, similar to how Extensions Manager lets you define sets of extensions and control panels. As things currently stand, whenever you want to search using Sherlock, you must individually click on which engines you want to use; it'd be a lot nicer to choose a "Games" set that automatically selects only six game site search engines, or a "Mac" set that activates eight Mac site searches. You get the idea.

Now, a lot of third-party workarounds already exist to add this functionality, none of which we've yet tried-- but we did notice that Apple has quietly posted its own workaround, which uses Applescript to allow the use of sets in Sherlock. We haven't given it a try yet, since the installation and set-up is a little involved; you have to download the Applescripts from Apple's web site, install the OSA Menu Applescript extra from the Mac OS 8.5 CD-ROM, and then add the downloaded Sherlock scripts to the OSA menu. Apparently, when you're finished, you'll have a cute little script icon in the menubar which will include a submenu to let your create, edit, activate, and delete Sherlock search sets. Unfortunately, it seems as though this implementation controls which search engines appear in Sherlock's list, but not which ones are checked, so we're not sure how useful this really is. Still, some of you Sherlock maniacs out there might find it to be useful. Search away!