A Pestering Little Problem
Way back in MacOS 8.5, a program called Sherlock was introduced. Sherlock gathered information from the internet and presented it into a quick little desktop application. Sherlock separated things into "channels." For example, you could check stock prices in the stock prices channel. One particularly useful channel was the movies channel which let you watch movie trailers and check showtimes in your area.
This was a great early use of web services. Everything was right there in Sherlock. Before you headed out to a theater, you can watch the trailer to see if the movie was something you were interested in. If not, just select another movie and see if piques your interest. No endless perusing through web page after web page.
When MacOS 10.4 came out, an even more promising technology was introduced - the Dashboard. Dashboard ran small little programs called Widgets. Widgets are pretty easy to create, and, with web services grown up, can be pretty powerful. Sherlock has been deprecated in favor of Dashboard.
There's just one problem. No one has ever created a movie widget as powerful as the old movie channels on Sherlock. Sure, there are a couple of widgets to check movie times, and one that checks trailers. However, there isn't one that does both. You could launch your browser and go to someplace like Fandango, but you'll have to deal with page load times, jumbled interfaces, and problems with plug-ins to view the trailers.
Introducing Moriarty
One day, I pretty much decided that I've had enough of this problem and set out to find a solution. I really miss the ability to watch trailers and check the times that the movie's playing from one interface. Stuart Montgomery and I have come up with the solution in the form of Moriarty, the trailer-playing, movie time-checking, widget.
User Guide
For installation and usage help, consult the Moriarty User Guide.
Cats Need To Be Fed
Stuart and I have spent a lot of time and resources into creating Moriarty. It was purely a labor of love and convenience for us. We do not make any money off of affiliate links or referrals. We hope you find it fun, useful, and lead to you consuming many tubs of popcorn at your local theater.
Moriarty is completely free for your own personal, non-commercial use. However, if you're feeling generous and would like to rack up some good karma, Stuart and I are taking donations through PayPal.
Your donation will keep Stuart off the Top Ramen while he's in college. As for me, if you haven't noticed, I have seven cats and three birds to feed. Please, won't anyone think of the cats? And the Stuart?
Download Now
And hat's off to you, Mr. Watson.
Download Moriarty 1.0 (7/25/06)
Keep in Touch
We have a few more things enhancements planned for Moriarty. To be informed of future updates, feel free to check back or enter your email address here. We promise to never give your email address to anyone* or to spam you with non-Moriarty stuff. If we do, you can beat both of us over the heads with baseball bats.
*Well, maybe only if they had a legitimate subpoena.
Well, What Do You Think?
Love it? Hate it? Bugs? Suggestions? We'd love to hear it.