About This Channel



Set Up The Channel Build Environment

  1. Copy this Channel to A Web Server

    Every channel must be hosted by a web server. This can be any http server, including any Mac OS X machine running Personal Web Server.

    Some possible locations:

    Path Base URL
    /Library/WebServer/Documents/ http://localhost/
    <your home directory>/Sites/ http://localhost/~yourUserName/
    <your iDisk>/Sites/ http://homepage.mac.com/<iDiskUserName>/

    If you choose to use your local machine as a the host server (the first two options listed), you will need to turn on Personal Web Server. Open the Sharing panel of System Preferences and make sure "Personal Web Sharing" is checked. In order for Sherlock to access channels on the same machine or "localhost", the environment variable SHERLOCK_DEBUG_CHANNELS must be set. To enable this configuration, open a Terminal window on your system and define the environment variable SHERLOCK_DEBUG_CHANNELS with a value of 1.
  2. Launch Sherlock in Debug Mode
    The Project Builder project for the Sherlock Channel template is set up to run Sherlock as the execution environment. When Sherlock is opened by selecting Run Executable from Project Builder's Debug menu, the SHERLOCK_DEBUG_CHANNELS environment variable is set to 1, enabling a channel debugging mode. This enables a Debug menu within Sherlock, and also enables debug messages to be sent from JavaScript and XQuery to the Console.

  3. Adding The Channel To Sherlock's Toolbar
    Typically, users will add your channel to their toolbar by clicking a sherlock:// URL from a web page or an email sent to them. You can add this channel by typing in a link to the channel's xml file in a popular browser, and hitting return. The URL will depend on where you put the channel. For example, a URL for a channel hosted in the /Library/WebServer/Documents/ folder might look like...

          sherlock://localhost/MyChannel/SherlockChannel.xml?action=add



Customizing The Channel

  1. Channel Identifier
    Each channel must have a unique identifier, in the style of JavaScript naming. This identifier is specified in the ImagesChannel.xml file.

  2. Channel Name
    The channel name is located in the /Channel/en.lproj/LocalizedResources.plist file.

  3. Channel Icon
    The channel icon can be either a .tiff or a .icns file. The path to the icon is specified in the ImagesChannel.xml file.