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Watson now available for free; Mac OS X 10.3.7 build 7S206

macOS 19 Comments

Watson developer Dan Wood has released his popular Mac OS X application free of charge–sort of. Mac users who want a copy must find and download it off the Web. Elsewhere, according to sources, Apple has seeded the second external build of Mac OS X 10.3.7 and is actively distributing recent builds of Tiger on DVD discs.

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Eugenia Loli

Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.

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19 Comments

  1. 2004-11-24 8:35 am
    Anonymous

    What benefit could Watson give Sun?

  2. 2004-11-24 8:39 am
    Anonymous

    Could someone post the file elsewhere? I mean, I don’t want to join that Yahoo thing…

  3. 2004-11-24 9:21 am
    Anonymous

    What benefit could Watson give Sun?

    Sun purchased Watson and ported to Java in what was known as Project Alameda. I think their main motivation may have been as a demo app that shows off Java/SWING and promote Java on the desktop. It was looking very nice until it was put on the back burner by Sun, there was a little talk of it being realeased as Open Source (back in august) but nothing has come from this yet.

    You can check out a blog following Project Alameda here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/KitchenSink?catname=Alameda

    And a screenshot here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/KitchenSink/Shopping67.jpg

  4. 2004-11-24 9:30 am
    Anonymous

    Is here: http://www.karelia.com/download/Watson_1.7.5.dmg“ rel=”nofollow”>http://web.archive.org/web/20031205005055/

  • 2004-11-24 10:05 am
    Anonymous

    Interesting, I’ve recently installed MacOS 10.3.6 and the strangest thing started to happen (started to happen in 10.3.5, but continued); what happens is I find that when I try to connect, there is a *really* long silence then it tries to ring up; after a hiss and a scretch, the connection dies and the dialer complains about “carrier not detected”. Anyone else experience that problem.

    But apart from that, everything is a-ok from this side of the desk 🙂

  • 2004-11-24 1:21 pm
    Anonymous

    i’d installed it on my PB17

    i had some huge problems with it, i’d had to re install it 2 times to have the login and at the end, there are really few valuable features, spotligh is indexing all the time.

    and worst : my battery is damaged !!!!!

    i’d gone back to 10.3.6 but i can’t charge it more than 69% . i have only 1h50 of autonomy 🙁

    i think i will stay on 10.3 until 10.5.

  • 2004-11-24 1:41 pm
    Anonymous

    Thats a bit of a shock, mind you, Tiger is a beta, and thus they do warn you of possible problems if running something experimental.

    As for 10.4 release, I’ll probably wait till 10.4.2-10.4.4 before upgrading; I’d much rather let the early adopters get burnt first.

    I did the samething with 10.3.x series, I waited till 10.3.3 came out, then upgraded, thus the *really* nasty bugs were kicked out and thus avoided any possible heartache.

    About the only thing I am looking forward to in 10.4 is the possibility of improved responsiveness; from what I understand alot more of the GUI is now being dumped onto the GPU, however, the downside is that these won’t be available for those who have eMacs or the old iLamp style iMac 🙁 then again, as they say, with progress, comes a little pain; maybe next year will be my opportunity to upgrade to a fancy 970 equiped iMac after the first refresh; hopefully that will mean that the low end model will be something like a 2Ghz 970 with possibly a beefier graphics card with 128MB and on a PCI-Express – which will probably occur when the PowerMac line are upgraded to PCI-Express.

  • 2004-11-24 1:52 pm
    Anonymous

    I too installed the beta (on a dual g5), and had no problems with it. It may depend on which release of Tiger yuo’re using also (mine was… v294, I think(?) – Dunno off-hand as I’m at work right now)

    Everything worked as advertised, and all was fast except for dragging windows. The sysem was dirt slow when it came to dragging windows around (so slow that you could draw the “path” to where you wanted a window, and then sit back and watch that window slowly move to the destination point). I’m guessing this was due to non-optimized video drivers, but who knows.

    It was really odd as animations, window sizing, and foldups (I use Unsanity’s Windowshade haxie) were fine, running as fast as 10.3.6, but the slow drags made me revert back to Panther.

    But other than the slow drags, everything worked great for me. Interstingly enough, just in case you’re inclined to try this, apps from Tiger wouldn’t come up at all under 10.3.6. After deciding to revert and reinstall panther, I dragged some apps (Nothing major… Automater, Safari2, and… Can’t remember the 3rd one)over to my ipod to see if they’d work at all under Panther, but no luck.

  • 2004-11-24 2:15 pm
    Anonymous

    I too installed the beta (on a dual g5), and had no problems with it. It may depend on which release of Tiger yuo’re using also

    It probably also depends on the fact that the previous poster was clueless.

    For the “few” new features he could have checked appleinsider or apple.com and see that they are not few, they are MANY and most of the very usefull, from infrastructure work to new apps.

    As for the spotlight “indexing all the time”, just let the bloody software index everything in batch mode ONE F****N TIME, leave it for several ours. It will then stop indexing “all the time” and start indexing transparently! How do you expect to know the contents of your hard disk the first time you install it? It doesn’t, so it has to index everything.

    Also the posibillity that Tiger damaged the …battery is silly. Either the meter is incorrect, you have to calibrate it or something, or simply the battery died on you. Apple gives an estimate for battery recharge time before this happens, around 1000 recharges IIRC. IMHO it is totally unrelated to having Tiger onboard at the time.

    Also, as the other posted said, Tiger version does matter, for completeness and bugs squashed, and as with all beta software crashes and bugs DO HAPPEN.

    So there.

  • 2004-11-24 3:24 pm
    Anonymous

    Calm down man, there’s no need to get so het up.

  • 2004-11-24 3:25 pm
    Anonymous

    ok your done

    for some reason when people are all like so there either there under 12 or abused im going with under 12 ok im done joking about stupid people

    beta products are nice when they come from small companys that go under befor the real thing ever comes out

  • 2004-11-24 4:18 pm
    Anonymous

    your harddrive access may have been something, but it probably wasn’t spotlight indexing. that’s not how spotlight works.

    from apple’s website:

    The Spotlight engine automatically takes all the metadata inside files and enabled applications and puts the data into a high-performance index. This process occurs transparently and in the background, so you never experience lag times or slow downs during normal operation. When you make a change, such as adding a new file, receiving an email or entering a new contact, Spotlight updates its index automatically. Results of search requests are displayed virtually as fast as you can type your query.

    http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlighttech.html

    it is not indexing constantly. it needs to build the initial index once, which may bite on your harddrive for a while (minutes, hours, a day, longer, who knows?), and then should never have to touch the entire index again (unless it becomes corrupted, i assume).

    try reading Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo. He was largely responsible for BeFS (which worked in a similar way) and is largely responsible for spotlight.

    i do have some questions: is spotlight functionality built into HFS+ (like the indexing in BFS) or is it a layer on top of HFS+? if it’s a layer above, how does that affect CLI tools? if i save a document in vi or nano, will it be will its index entry be added/modified right away? and is there any good resources on HFS+ like practical file system design was for BeFS?

  • 2004-11-24 4:58 pm
    Anonymous

    What does Watson do?

  • 2004-11-24 5:50 pm
    Anonymous

    Is Watson really being given out for free now? Looking for a confirmation from some official place (MacMinute doesn’t count). The download links given above seem to download a Watson 1.7.5 disk image, but it’s unmountable.

  • 2004-11-24 5:58 pm
    Anonymous

    Free? Get real. Watson is DEAD.

    Sun bought the rights and has killed it. Just like they killed Cobalt. And Lighthouse. etc.

  • 2004-11-24 8:23 pm
    Anonymous

    Um…, have you been following the thread? Yes, Sun bought the technology. MacMinute reported that the last version is now being given out for free, hence how this thread started on OSNews, and a link for the program was given above. The link provided doesn’t produce a useable disk image, and I can find no other confirmation of the original story. Watson can both be “DEAD” and be given out for free. Just trying to find out if the latter is true. (MacWorld UK has mirrored the MacMintue report.) Watson is still a good and useful tool, despite its demise.

  • 2004-11-24 8:46 pm
    Anonymous

    For those that are confused, read the announcement from Dan Wood at

    http://weblog.karelia.com/

    In summary:

    – yes, Watson was bought by Sun

    – yes, the Mac version is no longer under active development. (no details about the Java port; Sun has put it on the backburner. Who knows, maybe it could yet see the light of day)

    – In the spirit of Audion, Karelia is giving out a license key so people may use it for free.

    – You’ll need to find a place to download it yourself; it’s not on Karelia’s site.

    What I’m left wondering is, is this legal? If Sun owns Watson, how can Karelia give it away for free, even if Sun has no plans to continue development?

  • 2004-11-25 10:23 am
    Anonymous

    I have a strong feeling that we’ll see Watson play a major part of the next version of JDS – Version 4 – I’d say that it will be a good competitor to what Apple and Microsoft has to offer.

    With that being said, however, I must say that I wouldn’t use a text search if had it available; as long as the over head isn’t noticable, then it’ll be ok.