I've been an occasional user of Mac OS X's amped-up Sherlock for a while. But I'm just starting to realize how amped-up Apple made it in the latest release–by opening up its “channels” to non-Apple web services.

I was already impressed with many of the non-Apple channels added to Sherlock, like “Flights” (the FlyteComm-provided channel that plugs Sherlock into airlines' flight status databases) and “Yellow Pages” (the business directory that gives driving directions, from Switchboard).

But the lightbulb really went off for me when I added Feedster as a Sherlock channel. Now, I have this itch to build channels of my own. And I'd love to see somebody extend the ideas that are there already–like adding a feature for future flight lookup and pricing, or a price-comparing e-commerce channel…

Better yet, I'd like to see Apple offer an easy way to start consuming RSS feeds directly in Sherlock. It's great that you can search feeds on Feedster, but how about building a straight subscription engine right into Sherlock? I'm sure that with a little scripting, I could wire Radio or