As predicted, a few tools in Watson are no longer fully functional. This is unfortunate but very much expected due to the ever-changing landscape of Web services. Still, a good part of the program is still quite functional.
In fact, I recently read that Watson's Amazon.com tool integrates quite nicely with Delicious Library via drag and drop. A lot of this has to do with the support we had put into Watson for integrating with other applications, including your browser and Spring. If Delicious Library hooks up with PriceGrabber, we may find similar compatibility between the two applications as well, either through luck or through design.
I've read the True Story of Audion that has been circulating recently. It's interesting how similar Panic's and Karelia's stories are, and yet we are still here, even if our original flagship applications are not. I was impressed that they released Audion free of charge from now on. I had considered that with Watson, but I didn't want to alienate the people who had recently paid for the software... it was hard enough having to wait so long before we could let the cat out of the bag about the deal with Sun, so close to the day when we could no longer support the program.
But a few months has gone by, and though Karelia can no longer support the program, or even keep copies of it, the program is circulating around on the Internet. So why not follow Audion's lead and do something similar?
So ... as of today, Watson (bumps and bruises and all, but still in decent shape) is now freely available. But the catch is, we can't make a new version that doesn't require entering a registration code; we don't have the source to Watson anymore. But we can give out a registration code that anybody is welcome to use.
So here's the deal. Get a copy of Watson from a friend, or look for it somewhere on the Internet, as Karelia can't provide it directly. (The latest version, for instance, is available on the Yahoo! Watson Users Group, but if somebody wants to host a mirror of it, I'll post the URL here.) Then launch it and choose "Register Watson..." under the "Watson" menu.
* Enter your name and (optionally) your organization.
* In the E-mail address field, enter:
nobody@karelia.com
* And in the Registration field, enter:
BNVQTTW 4P3SMC7 R7L8S3V 1XGKGG7A
(Or, select the text of this message and drag into the registration window.) And that's it! Remember, this is unsupported software.
Update: Unfortunately, the Watson Users Group was set for manual approval, and that was quite a deluge of requests to join the group. We're trying to process all the requests, but in the meantime, I've changed the group to open membership -- hopefully no spammers will join in the next few days -- so if you have tried to join but haven't gotten in, try joining again now.