Sams Teach Yourself Mac OS X Digital Media All In One - page 66

The Yellow Pages Channel

Use the Yellow Pages channel, shown in Figure 5.23, to obtain the phone number and address for a business and to view a map of its location. Simply enter the business name and either the city and state or the ZIP Code of the area to search, and click the green button. In the middle pane, choose from among the list of potential matches to see detailed information.

To receive driving directions, you must first enter an address in the Locations tab of the Sherlock Preferences. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Choose Preferences, shown in Figure 5.24, from the Sherlock menu.

   Figure 5.24. You can enter multiple addresses in the Locations tab.

   

2. Click the Add button to create an untitled entry under Locations.

3. To change the label of your new location, double-click on the word Untitled until only that word is highlighted and then type a new label. Keep in mind that you can have more than one location entered, so change it to something meaningful.

4. Fill in the information on the right side of the window.

5. Close the Preferences window. Your entry is saved as you type. To delete an entry, simply select it from the Locations listing and press the Delete key on your keyboard.

When you return to the Yellow Pages channel, you can select the location you added in the Driving Directions From pop-up menu. The Directions pane fills with step-by-step instructions.

The eBay Channel

From the eBay channel, you can search active eBay auctions and track those of interest to you. To search, enter keywords in the Item Title text entry field and set your other parameters, such as product category, region, and price range, and then click the search button. When you choose a result from the search, its details fill the bottom panes of the screen, as shown in Figure 5.25.

To track an item, highlight it in the results listing and click the Track Auction button at lower right. Changing to Track mode using the button just below the search field reveals a list of only those items you're tracking. To remove an item, select it and press the Delete key on your keyboard.

The Flights Channel

For information on current flights, go to the Flights channel. Here you can view flight status by route or by airline and flight number. Select a specific flight for details about the aircraft and flight. For some entries, you can also view a chart depicting the plane's position en route, as shown in the lower-right corner of Figure 5.26.

The Dictionary Channel

As you might expect, you look up word definitions in the Dictionary channel. For some words, you also see a list of phrases containing that word from Roget's II Thesaurus .

The Translation Channel

The Translation channel performs rough translations between different languages. English speakers can translate into Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, and then back to English. When using this service, keep in mind that computer-generated translations do not match the output of a skilled human translator.

The AppleCare Channel

If you have a specific technical question that Help Viewer can't resolve, the AppleCare channel enables you to search the AppleCare Knowledge Base for reports about Apple products and issues.

Now that we explored the channels, let's examine the features accessible in Sherlock's preferences.

Sherlock Preferences

Sherlock's preference dialog box, shown earlier in Figure 5.24, contains four tabsLocations, Countries , Subscriptions, and Securityin which you can adjust Sherlock's settings. We discussed the Locations configurations earlier during our look at the Yellow Pages channel.

The Countries tab enables you to specify which countries' channels you want to receive. By default, only the country you selected during set up is turned on, but other countries in which the same language is spoken also appear. To see a list of all countries, check the Show All Countries box.

The Subscriptions tab enables you to add additional channels to Sherlock. Although the current version of Sherlockversion 3.5is somewhat new, in the past it was common for Web site owners to write plug-ins for Sherlock that allowed it to include those sites in its searches. In the Subscriptions tab, you can add channels created by people outside of Apple.

The Security tab contains settings to enable channels from non-Apple sources. If you don't enable the Web sites of channels you've added in the Subscriptions tab, you are asked to approve each channel that's not part of Apple's basic set. The Security tab also contains settings to manage cookies that might be encountered by Sherlock as it searches the Internet on your behalf .

Cookies are small files sent to your computer from Web sites. Sites use cookies to keep track of you as you interact with the site. (This is because the computer running the Web site doesn't have another way to recognize that you're the same person who looked at the preceding page.) Even though cookies are mostly harmless, some people don't like the idea of having others track their movements on the Internet, even if the information is most likely never seen by human eyes.