Welcome to Sherlock Assistant! You’ve just discovered a dramatic improvement to Mac OS 8.5’s best feature — Sherlock, the Internet-searching program. Sherlock Assistant is a better-looking, more powerful, and more flexible window where you can set up your online searches.
What it’s for
Sherlock Assistant doesn’t search the Internet itself. Instead, it passes along your search criteria to Mac OS 8.5’s own Sherlock program. So why use Sherlock Assistant at all? Here are some of its advantages over the original Sherlock:
∑ Sherlock Assistant looks better. It has a clean, neat window that you can resize to accommodate a large number of Sherlock plug-ins. (A Sherlock plug-in is a small file bearing the name of a specific Web site, such as Yahoo, Lycos, or Amazon.com. Each plug-in teaches the Sherlock program how to search that particular Web site. Only a few come with Mac OS 8.5, but the Internet seethes with additional free Sherlock plug-ins written by programmers around the world.)
Mac OS 8.5’s Sherlock program, by contrast, can show you no more than 6 search sites at a time without scrolling.
∑ Sherlock Assistant can manage your plug-ins. Sherlock Assistant makes it easy for you to install, remove, and manage groups of plug-ins.
∑ Sherlock Assistant is Web-savvy. With one menu command, you can visit Web sites that list hundreds of additional Sherlock plug-ins.
∑ Sherlock Assistant fixes bugs. Sherlock Assistant can repair some of the glitches in Mac OS 8.5’s Sherlock program, as described at the end of this document.
How to use Sherlock Assistant
Sherlock Assistant is an application, so you can store it anywhere you like on your hard drive. You might consider, however, dragging it onto your System Folder icon. The Mac automatically proposes storing it in your Apple Menu Items folder. That way, whenever you feel like searching the Internet, don’t open Mac OS 8.5’s regular Sherlock program. Instead, choose Sherlock Assistant’s name from your menu.
When you do so, a window like this appears:
In the Words area, type what you’re looking for — “used electric cars,” “Saddam Hussein as a child,” or whatever. Then, in the lower-left quadrant of the window, turn on the checkboxes of the Web pages you’d like to search. You can select as many or as few as you like. (You can even place checkmarks in all the checkboxes a once, or remove them from all checkboxes, using the Enable All and Disable All commands in the Sets menu.) Finally, click the Search button (or press the Return key).
Sherlock Assistant promptly opens the regular Sherlock search program, which processes your search request in the usual Mac OS 8.5 way. Sherlock Assistant’s work is done.
Tip: To turn many checkboxes on or off all at once, first select the plug-ins’ names in the list. (See “Selecting groups of plug-ins” later in this document.) If you now click the check mark logo at the top of the checkbox column, Sherlock Assistant turns on or off all the selected plug-ins’ checkboxes at once.
Getting Info on a plug-in
Single-click a plug-in’s name to view an information panel on the right side of the window. This window indicates which Web site the plug-in searches, often provides a description, and indicates when the plug-in was written and when you most recently updated it.
Tip: If you double-click a plug-in’s name, Sherlock Asisstant signs onto the Internet, launches your Web browser, and goes directly to that Web page.
Changing the look
While Sherlock Assistant’s window is in front of you, you can manipulate it in any of these ways:
Directly above the list of plug-ins, furthermore, is the “Listed by” pop-up menu. It offers two useful commands the pertain to the sorting order of your plug-ins. “By Enabled” means that you’ll see all checked (turned on) plug-ins listed at the top of the list. “By Name” shows your list alphabetically instead.
Adding and Removing Plug-ins
As Mac OS 8.5’s popularity grows, more and more Web sites will become searchable through the creation of more and more Sherlock plug-in files. (For a quick selection of several hundred, visit the Apple Sherlock Plug-in Directory or the Apple-Donuts Web page. Connecting to these two sites is easy — just choose their names from Sherlock Assistant’s Web menu.)
Scrolling through a long list of these sites in Sherlock’s window, however, isn’t anyone’s idea of fun. For that reason, Sherlock Assistant makes it easy to install, remove, and organize your plug-in files.
Installing new plug-ins
To install a new plug-in file, drag its icon directly into Sherlock Assistant’s list of plug-ins, as shown here:
The plug-in’s name promptly appears in the list. (Behind the scenes, Sherlock Assistant copies that icon into the correct System folder location — the folder called Internet Search Sites.)
Alternatively, you can drag plug-in icons directly onto Sherlock Assistant’s own desktop icon — even if the program isn’t running. Sherlock Assistant opens, displaying the plug-in you’ve just installed.
Removing plug-ins
To remove a plug-in from the list, click once on its name in the Sherlock Assistant window. Then, from the File menu, choose Move to Trash. (Speed shortcut: press -Delete.) That plug-in’s desktop icon is automatically taken out of the System folder (and therefore out of Sherlock’s list) and placed into the trash.
Selecting groups of plug-ins
To select several plug-ins all at once (for mass removal, for example), use any of these tricks:
You can also use the Select All command in the Edit menu to highlight all of your plug-in names at once.
Plug-in sets
If you’ve ever used Conflict Catcher, you already understand the idea behind sets — groups of files, memorized in specific on/off combinations, which you can summon with a single click.
In the same way, Sherlock Assistant can memorize a certain on/off combination of plug-in checkboxes. For example, suppose that every morning, you like to search the Web’s best news sites for the headlines. You could create a set in which the checkboxes for only the Internet’s news sites, such as CNN or USA Today, are selected. Each morning, you could just choose News Sites from Sherlock Assistant’s Active Set menu — check marks automatically appear only next to the news-site plug-ins in your list.
To create a set
Start by clicking the checkboxes next your plug-ins’ names until checkmarks appear only next to the sites you’d like to search. Then, from the Sets menu, choose Save Set As. This dialog box appears:
Type a name for your set. Click the Locked checkbox, if you wish; in subsequent uses of Sherlock Assistant, you’ll still be allowed to turn on and off the checkboxes of this set—but such changes won’t be preserved as part of the set. Finally, click OK.
From now on, the set name you typed will appear in Sherlock Assistant’s Active Set menu, like this:
To switch sets
To switch from one set of turned-on checkmarks to another, choose the set’s name from the Active Set pop-up menu.
Editing sets
To change the checkmark configuration of a set, click away on the checkboxes. (The set’s name appears underlined to remind you that the changes haven’t been saved.) Then, from the Sets menu, choose Save Set.
On the other hand, if you’ve made some checkbox changes that you don’t want made a permanent part of the active set, choose Revert Set from the Sets menu.
You can also rename the active set, or change its locked/unlocked status, by choosing Modify Set from the Sets menu.
Managing your sets
To delete a set, choose its name from the Active Set pop-up menu. Then, from the Sets menu, choose Remove Set “Mac News” (or whatever the set’s name is). In the confirmation dialog box, click Yes.
You can also, by the way, transfer your set information to other Macs, so that they’re configured the same way. To export a set, choose Export Sets from the File menu. A dialog box like this appears:
Select the names of the sets you’d like to export (by clicking, Shift-clicking, or -clicking, as illustrated above), and then click OK. You’re now asked to specify a name and location for the set-information files you’re about to create.
The resulting set files can copied, e-mailed, or transferred other Macs. Once there, Sherlock Assistant’s Import command (in the File menu) can add those set names, including their plug-in on/off status information, to the destination Macs.
Tip: Instead of using the Import command, you can summon the Import Sets dialog box by dragging saved-set icons directly from the desktop onto the Sherlock program icon — or even directly into Sherlock’s file list.
Tip: Sherlock Assistant can also import set information from files created by Holmes, another popular plug-in management program.
Troubleshooting
You’re more likely to encounter glitches with Mac OS 8.5’s own Sherlock program than with the far simpler Sherlock Assistant program. Here are a couple of tricks:
Sherlock doesn’t search
When you first install Mac OS 8.5, the Sherlock program has only enough memory to search only a handful of Web sites. If you have added a large number of plug-ins, that dog, as the saying goes, won’t hunt.
The solution: locate the Sherlock program. (Open your hard drive, open System folder, and open the Apple Menu Items folder — there it is.) Click once to highlight Sherlock; from the File menu, choose Get Info. In the resulting dialog box, choose Memory from the pop-up menu. Allot more memory program by increasing the number in the bottom memory box by, say, 15 percent, like this:
When you close the Sherlock Info window, the program should once again search properly.
Plug-ins don’t update correctly
Plug-ins are frequently updated by their creators to make them smarter and stabler. Mac OS 8.5’s Sherlock program offers an Update Search Sites command that automatically goes online, checks appropriate Web sites to look for updates, and even downloads and installs any updates it finds.
Unfortunately, Sherlock can get confused. Sometimes its information about the revision dates of your plug-ins gets hopelessly corrupted. The result: sometimes your copy of Sherlock will go into search-and-update mode every single day — other times, it won’t ever update your files.
The solution is in Sherlock Assistant’s File menu, in the form of the command called Reset Plug-ins Checked Date. This command removes any corruption from the installation dates of your plug-ins, thus ensuring that Sherlock’s update commands will work properly in the future.
Sherlock doesn’t start searching
Suppose you set up a search in Sherlock Assistant. When you click Search, the full Mac OS 8.5 Sherlock program is supposed to open and begin searching the Internet.
If Sherlock opens but doesn’t begin searching, it’s probably because you interrupted a previous Sherlock search, placing it into a pause mode. Just quit Sherlock, return to Sherlock Assistant, and try again; this time, the Sherlock search will begin on its own.
The “No resource fork” problem
For geeks only: You may have heard about the Sherlock problem in which certain plug-ins lack a resource fork, thus causing all kinds of erratic Sherlock behavior. So that you can sleep easier, Sherlock Assistant is designed to locate such faulty plug-ins and automatically add a resource fork. You don’t have to do anything except enjoy a life without the “no resource fork” problem.
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