I’m a paid registered user of the Mac program ***Watson|http://www.karelia.com/watson/***. Watson is a web services application, similar to Apple’s ***Sherlock|http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/sherlock/*** tool. The idea behind web services tools such as this is that rather than navigate to dozens of different websites to get stock quotes, weather, news, movie tickets, flight information, package tracking, etc…. you use one application that has hooks into these websites. The application does the searching and browsing for you, and puts all of the handy tools in one easy to access location.

Well, the latest news is that Watson’s technology has been licensed by ***Sun Microsystems|http://www.sun.com/***. Dan Wood discusses it in a recent ***blog entry|http://weblog.karelia.com/Watson/Now_I_can_talk_a_bi.html***. Watson will reach its end-of-life on October 5, 2004. In the meantime, Sun has created a new, cross-platform, Java-based version of Watson named ***Project Alameda|http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/KitchenSink***.

Watson is a great time-saving tool, and I’m sure Alameda will continue to be just as excellent. Keep up the good work, folks!