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I think it's lame that the 2 hit new features are shameless ripoffs of existing shareware apps. Dashboard is to Konfabulator as Spotlight is to Launchbar. They may have some improvement over the original, but who could say with a straight face that they didn't get the idea from these shareware developers?

Pikace, I suggest that you inform yourself better before making that kind of statement.

Dashboard vs Konfabulator
Konfab Confab

Pikace, I suggest that you inform yourself better before making that kind of statement.

Dashboard vs Konfabulator
Konfab Confab

Just to feed the troll, no, it's not. Apple invented its own Desktop widgets with the original Macintosh. Remember Stickies, Calculator, Scrapbook? Konfabulator isn't a terribly original idea, although pretty and good for the wow factor. At least with Dashboard, you get something that's built-in, and therefore less of a processor- and memory-hog. Also, it actually has an accessible API that uses industry-standard programming and scripting languages.

Finally, one of the biggest disadvantages for would-be Konfabulator developers is the fact that they can't sell a module until the user buys Konfabulator. Daring Fireball had a great article on this; I suggest you check it out.

Just to feed the troll, no, it's not. Apple invented its own Desktop widgets with the original Macintosh. Remember Stickies, Calculator, Scrapbook? Konfabulator isn't a terribly original idea, although pretty and good for the wow factor. At least with Dashboard, you get something that's built-in, and therefore less of a processor- and memory-hog. Also, it actually has an accessible API that uses industry-standard programming and scripting languages.

Finally, one of the biggest disadvantages for would-be Konfabulator developers is the fact that they can't sell a module until the user buys Konfabulator. Daring Fireball had a great article on this; I suggest you check it out.

Neatly summed up by Daring Fireball

You see, John Siracusa is a Mac fan who's hard on Apple. John Gruber is a Mac fan who is hard on Apple. Paul Thurrot is a Microsoft-shill who writes uninformed trolling articles to drive pageviews. Go ahead, read any of his articles on Longhorn, Windows XP, anything Apple/Linux/Google related and try and tell me he's even the slightest a "fan" just trying to be constructive.

He's a very skillful troll. Thanks for feeding him.

speculation is one thing, these people were publishing documents and slides. READ THE COURT RULING

Actually, if you had READ THE COURT RULING you would see Apple clearly demonstrated that they were trade secrets.

Apple has PLENTY of proof, and you would know that if you READ THE COURT RULING

And since Apple demonstrated to the courts that the information published is reasonably believeable to be from an NDA, under the UTSA they were obligated by law to not publish the information and are obligated by law to reveal the source. Perhaps you should try READING THE COURT RULING

Wow, you didn't actualy READ THE COURT RULING at all did you? If you did, you would have noted the court is all about PROOF, and you would have noticed that something which serves the PUBLIC INTEREST (such as a DEADLY drug) would still be protected. But then again, this is slashdot, why would I expect anyone to READ THE COURT RULING

Wow, you didn't actualy READ THE COURT RULING at all did you? If you did, you would have noted the court is all about PROOF, and you would have noticed that something which serves the PUBLIC INTEREST (such as a DEADLY drug) would still be protected. But then again, this is slashdot, why would I expect anyone to READ THE COURT RULING

If you had actually bothered to READ THE COURT RULING you would find that Apple PROVED that trade secrets were leaked and therefore a law was broken.

Note to journalists. If it says "Apple Confidential" DON"T PUBLISH IT.

Great, but under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act there is absolutely no evidence that this is a trade secret!

I think slides that say Apple Confidential on them would be evidence enough. In fact the courts found them to be evidence enough. But this is slashdot, why would I expect someone to actually READ the ruling and the facts

Usability is all too frequently seen as a "bonus add-on" than one of the core pieces of software design. Slick icons and app "skinning" do not make anything more usable. If you developers aren't down with taking design criticism from a non-coder [as many I've encountered are] about things other than the way something looks at least take the time to read up on these subjects yourself. People like Don Norman, Steve Krug, Alan Cooper, and teams from Apple and Microsoft all have a great deal of writings on these subjects available.

Relevant reading on this subject by John Gruber:
Ronco Spray-on Usability
Sundry 'Spray-On' Clarifications and Corrections

Usability is all too frequently seen as a "bonus add-on" than one of the core pieces of software design. Slick icons and app "skinning" do not make anything more usable. If you developers aren't down with taking design criticism from a non-coder [as many I've encountered are] about things other than the way something looks at least take the time to read up on these subjects yourself. People like Don Norman, Steve Krug, Alan Cooper, and teams from Apple and Microsoft all have a great deal of writings on these subjects available.

Relevant reading on this subject by John Gruber:
Ronco Spray-on Usability
Sundry 'Spray-On' Clarifications and Corrections

You might want to check for this issue.

More likely, it's his Font Cache that screws up. Cleaning this can dramatically improve the boot process.

Stating that Apple refused to adopt backward compatibility is ignoring the fact that you can still run ancient software in Classic layer and will be able to for some time
You'd have to admit the classic support is akward. I personally never thought about this lack of backwards compatability until I read This article There's an odd anti-ms/pro-mac slant to this, but it's informative.

It's my personal opinion that computers ought to do more than look pretty sitting there.

Hailing "blogging" is effectively like hailing paper - it's just a way to get your word out. Independent writers and publishers, like John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) and Joel Spolsky (http://joelonsoftware.com/) as well as the personal thoughts from people that are inside different industries - like Om - are what you like, the gems of which you speak. Sure - "blogging" as a media sure has its upsides, and I'm not sure we would have seen these writers without the rise of it. But hailing "blogging" - as some people here do - is no more correct than saying that all comments on Slashdot ought to be rated 5, Insightful. The opposite - degrading something for being based on the "blogging" format just because kids use it, too - is in essence no different than degrading the New York Times because the New York Times publishes on paper, and kids draw stupid stuff on paper. I hope we'll finally get away from all the hype on the particular media.

Careful -- you're being a bit misleading, too.

As John Gruber noted, Dashboard and Konfabulator are quite different in implementation. Dashboard is similar in what it looks like, but that's about it. Konfabulator widgets are not HTML+CSS.

Of the 3 categories you list,
- In addition to NeXT, they've bought other things that were valuable to them -- what became iTunes, for example.
- Where they developed "an equivilent in-house", well, every example I can think of is *significantly* better than the original.
- And they also license many things: you need a license to ship an MP3 encoder, for one. Look at the about-window for your Apple programs and see how many things they licensed.

The rule seems to be "we'll do what we need to do to make a great product", *not* "we don't like licensing". If something is close to what they'd build anyway, they buy it or license it. If nothing like what they want exists, they build it themselves. Don't read too deep into individual decisions.

The original poster was talking about more money for Apple means more R&D, and then somehow someone brought up Microsoft, and then someone rebutted how little Microsoft research is worth and then another rebuttal on how much cool research Microsoft has and I brought up the point that Apple doesn't publish, they do.

I do believe usability is innovation. The difference between a rock and an ax is a matter of shaping the rock correctly, and you can get a 1000fold improvement in efficiency, and the only difference is the proper application of force to chip away flakes. That's a usability enhancement, AND it is innovation.

The continuous refinements of adding a metal blade to a plow, adding a moldboard to turn the earth, and finally polishing the blade to reduce friction were all tremendous innovations by reducing the amount of work, and therefore increasing the efficiency, a farmer had to do to till and sow his fields.

In the same way, I argue that Apple continuous refinements are also changing the way people work, not in leaps and bounds, but by making it easier to manage multiple windows, keep multiple programs open, search an increasing amount of data, access an increasing amount of data, and manage an increasing amount of data.

Just because a meta-data database exists (NTFS has had the capability, indexes have been around since Windows 95 I'm sure) doesn't mean anything if it isn't being used. Apple's innovation is to make the indexing happen during file writes, and not overnight schedules like Windows, to keep the index up to date. Additionally Apple is placing search APIs throughout the entire OS, and has placed a 'search' field directly into the Finder interface since OS X 10.2.

I use Microsoft Windows at work and my Mac at home, and you don't know how frustrating it is that my 1.8GHz PC has to search and grind for minutes what my Mac can find in seconds. This applies to just about everything that I do, from maintaining fifteen open windows, eight open applications, searching my mail, searching my desktop, searching the network, and searching my files.

Yes, nothing Apple is doing is revolutionary by themselves; it's only the combination of refinements in all aspects combined that a revolution occurs. Let the computer do the hard work it's good at (organnizing, indexing, and compiling) and let the human do the hard work he's good at (creating, editing, and doing).

You also harp on Dashboard. Yes, Apple should have given more credit to the Konfabulator people. However Apple also has had widgets since 1984 with the release of the original Mac. Of course they weren't called widgets and they didn't use Expose, and they were called Desktop Accessories, but Apple did invent them.

You also pan Automator: Full blown IDEs and programming environments have been around for years, just like before iTunes databases have been around for years, but like how Apple put a database into iTunes changed the way people are using gigabytes of music, Automator can change the way people program their computers. For most people programming is hard, and Automator is supposed to make it simpler.

This whole market share angle is mostly bogus. There is what, about 10 million OS X users? Why hasn't there been a worm (or trojan, anything!) attacking them? Witty has a very successful worm: it hit all 12,000 vulnerable hosts.

How can you say 10 million is too small? The population of Canada (where I live) is about 33 million. The installed OS X based is then (about) 1/3 the population of Canada. That's not far from the population of New York city (~15M).

If a worm can hit only 12,000 hosts like Witty did and be called "successful" (it was basically a 100% infection rate), then surely the OS X population is vulnerable.

John Gruber has some articles on this.

This whole market share angle is mostly bogus. There is what, about 10 million OS X users? Why hasn't there been a worm (or trojan, anything!) attacking them? Witty has a very successful worm: it hit all 12,000 vulnerable hosts.

How can you say 10 million is too small? The population of Canada (where I live) is about 33 million. The installed OS X based is then (about) 1/3 the population of Canada. That's not far from the population of New York city (~15M).

If a worm can hit only 12,000 hosts like Witty did and be called "successful" (it was basically a 100% infection rate), then surely the OS X population is vulnerable.

John Gruber has some articles on this.

John Gruber has good commentary on this here and here that cuts through the marketing to point out the small print.

John Gruber has good commentary on this here and here that cuts through the marketing to point out the small print.

Specify in which Think Secret article Nick talked about "what his cat did today". You're right - it's about rumors. You're wrong - it's not a weblog just because it's published serially.

I refer you to the excellent "If The New York Times Jumped Off a Bridge" for good parallells between journalism and Think Secret's material.

I can't help thinking that this is bad timing on Think-Secret's part. To raise your profile by doing (again!)

The reason is that Nick Ciarelli is making beaucoup cash from Think Secret. It has been a cash cow for him.

On the other hand, there's the case that if he's not doing anything wrong, why not continue doing exactly that.

The blog world is having a field day with this case but the reality is that Apple is not trying to limit what blogs report, and they do not consider Think Secret to be a blog site. It is a rumor site that has broken the law by soliciting confidential information and compensating those who choose to divulge confidential proprietary information. Good write up on the reality here.

I think you should read Jon Gruber's take on the Dashboard vs. Konfabulator controversy.

You said:

To MS' credit, when they steal an idea, they at least offer to buy off the inventor, ESPECIALLY if the inventor is a small to midsized firm.

What exactly is it that Arlo Rose invented? He didn't invent applets. He didn't invent the concept of the user being able to create their own applets.

What exactly did Arlo do that was original enough that he might be granted a monopoly on applets?

The answer is, absolutely nothing. He came up with a cool implementation that looked good, nothing more.

Only Steve Jobs could find a way to make a guy who wrote an extraordinarily popular platform for OSX so pissed off the guy declared he was moving the whole thing over to Windows.

Factually wrong. The port to windows was announced six months prior to anyone outside of Apple having a hint that Dashboard was coming. Do you just repeat shit that you've heard without checking, or are you in the habit of pulling things out of your ass?

Either way, interesting article on what (if anything) the lack of the firewire cable means - http://daringfireball.net/

Not only are blogs that report on topics outside the mainstream interesting, but blogs on specialized, niche topics are quite useful too. Take, for example, good Mac blogs, or the ones dedicated to esoteric subjects like the publishing industry. Such subjects can't easily be covered inexpensively by other media (like magazines and newspapers) because of the printing costs, distribution time, etc. That means relatively small communities interested in specific subject areas can coalesce around websites, instead of existing as isolated stars in a vast universe of people.

Omniweb does this. It's also does a lot of other cool stuff, like save your workspace - so it remembers what sites you had open when you close and reopen it.

It's Mac OS X only though.

Here's the full John Gruber review.

I'm no fan of the rumour sites, but I find there to be enormous potential for a very troubling precedent here.

The court has to consider two things.

1) What is a "journalist"?
2) Do journalists have the right to protect their sources?

If the publisher of Think Secret is defined as "not a journalist", a whole lot of other Web-based media are going to find themselves in a whole lot of hot water for similar stuff. The Druge Report, Salon, etc. -- there's no print media there, so on the surface I don't see a whole lot of difference between these sites and Think Secret.

If journalists don't have the right to protect their sources, controversial and very important stories in the media will completely dry up, because the sources won't wish to be put in a position where they could be revealed.

IMO -- and IANAL -- if the anonymous e-mail to Think Secret is truly anonymous, and Nick was smart enough not to keep server logs around, Apple stands to gain absolutely nothing from this suit, because if he did things properly, Nick has absolutely no idea who his source is. It doesn't matter how many lawyers Apple has, it doesn't matter what Apple threatens to do to him. If he doesn't know, he can't tell them!

I sincerely hope this is the case, though I seriously doubt it. In all likelihood, Nick knows exactly who his source is, and he wants to protect that source to preserve his future revenue stream. IMO, that's despicable and cheap.

But it's the same thing every other form of media does, and media consumers absolutely lap it up. Newspapers make money by selling ads in their paper. TV shows make money by selling commercial airtime. These more traditional media outlets have published or broadcast "scoops" that I guarantee upset people who wanted the release to be staged a certain way. This happens in the auto industry all the time. But the auto industry isn't run by megalomaniacs of the same calibre as Uncle Steve. The point is, just because a media outlet exists as part of a for-profit enterprise doesn't make any tips it receives about unreleased products "corporate espionage". AFAIK, "corporate espionage" requires malicious intent. I rather doubt any of Apple's competitors gained anything by having one week's advance notice that the Mac mini and iPod Shuffle were coming out. Hell, most of Apple's competitors have spent the last month and a half talking about how utterly useless and passé these two products are, rather than cracking the whip on their engineering departments to get copycat products to market ASAP.

So I hope Apple loses the suit, not because I like Think Secret (I firmly believe that the rumour sites hurt Apple), but because I believe in the sanctity of the media's right not to reveal their sources.

p

What the hell are you babbling about? You mean error -42, or the little bomb symbol that appeared until OS 9? You mean this is different from the blue screen of death?

Accessories, parts, and noone [sic] else's.You can buy other stuff.

I agree that Apple's secrecy borders on the bizarre sometimes, but it's also there for a reason.

Read this: http://daringfireball.net/2005/01/the_rumor_game

As always, that advice is a load of horse hockey.

p

Not ridiculous at all, if you think about it. John Gruber has explained why Apple does indeed suffer damages from the rumor sites.

You're thinking of Konfabulator. Dashboard is not a rip off of Konfabulator. I suggest you go read this essay/blog/whatever on Dashboard vs. Konfabulator.

The real identity of ThinkSecret's author has not been all that secret.

Maybe Apple just now read Daring Fireball's January 5th column: "Plugging Leaks"

"The suit is filed against site owner The dePlume Organization, as well as its owner who uses the pseudonym Nick dePlume, whose real identity Apple has not determined." Which I find slightly curious, in that I thought it was widely known in Mac insider circles that dePlume is Nick Ciarelli, whose identity as Nick dePlume was hinted at by byline changes at eWeek. While working at eWeek, "Nick dePlume" shared several eWeek bylines with Matthew Rothenberg on Mac rumor-related stories; starting in 2003, similar stories were bylined "Nick Ciarelli and Matthew Rothenberg"."

How is Apple being a bunch of dicks? Have you forgotten that violating an NDA is illegal?

You may not like that Apple is suing Nick, but you have to realize that there are repercussions for your actions whether you like it or not.

I suggest you read this article at Daring Fireball to see why Apple is likely doing what they're doing. Ask yourself if you wouldn't do the same if your company, and the livelihood of your employees depended on the technology and secrecy thereof until the appropriate time.

This type of "buzz" on the street is a wonderful marketing tool and I see no way in which it harms your business.

Here are some good arguments why this may not be true:

http://daringfireball.net/2005/01/the_rumor_game

http://adzoox.com/otherendoftheroom.html

About the harm of rumors...

Daringfireball also has a nice little article covering this lawsuit and Nicks identity.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a nice piece on the lawsuit.

Part of the problem is definition: exactly what from each current OS paradigm (each one of which reached its current form for a reason) should this ideal Unix take, and what should it leave? As soon as one gets into the gritty parts of the answer, no one can agree, people splinter their OS, developers don't know which OS to target and users are confused. I don't remember where I read it (Daring Fireball, possibly), but someone pointed out that creating a new standard from two conflicting standards often simply creates three conflicting standards. And these days there seem to be Standard^N standards. The problem is that no standard will leave 100% satisfaction because no single person's needs are identical to another person's.

In addition, there's the massive Windows install base that gets so much vendor, developer and other support that inertia works against the large-scale -- and by large scale I mean more than 10,000,000 people -- end-user machines. That means developers/users/vendors can target a myriad of smaller *nix OSes or the giant OS.

Furthermore, although I agree with your problem list above, I'd add the lack of a standard API. If one wants to develop for Windows, there is a more-or-less monolithic API. For OS X, there is Cocoa or Carbon. For Unix and Linux, I don't even understand the situation sufficiently to name all the possible API permutations. Each permutation has its reason for existance. Which brings me back to my first paragraph, which is that each splinter of *nix has its reason for existance. This makes writing high-quality GUI software for heterogeneous deployment difficult. To solve that problem, maybe someone will create The One Distribution, but then someone else will dislike something about it and fork it or write their own One Distribution, which will have problems of its own (like adoption and incompatibility with other standards).

Before someone accuses me of describing the problem rather than solving it, allow me to plead guilty. Much as I don't know how to solve the seemingly impossible muddle in the Middle East, I don't know how to solve the *nix problem. I use OS X, which solves all the bulleted points of the parent poster (or at least solves them well enough for my purposes), but the OS X entry cost is also relatively high. I'd love to see a low-cost *nix match or surpass OS X, but I cannot forsee that happening in the near (next three years) future.

Disclaimer: More recently, I have migrated to OS X as my primary platform, and I use very little cross platform software here since it rarely integrates well with the rest of the system or follows the HIGs. Windows and *NIX users are easier to please with cross platform software since programs that don't fully conform to the platform's UI guidelines are the norm.

Yes, because Apple always follows guidelines on that stuff.

Or not. Having HIG and following them are two very different beasts, and I'd be willing to bet that GNOME, at least, does a better job of following its own HIG than does Apple.

Disclaimer: More recently, I have migrated to OS X as my primary platform, and I use very little cross platform software here since it rarely integrates well with the rest of the system or follows the HIGs. Windows and *NIX users are easier to please with cross platform software since programs that don't fully conform to the platform's UI guidelines are the norm.

Yes, because Apple always follows guidelines on that stuff.

Or not. Having HIG and following them are two very different beasts, and I'd be willing to bet that GNOME, at least, does a better job of following its own HIG than does Apple.

Disclaimer: More recently, I have migrated to OS X as my primary platform, and I use very little cross platform software here since it rarely integrates well with the rest of the system or follows the HIGs. Windows and *NIX users are easier to please with cross platform software since programs that don't fully conform to the platform's UI guidelines are the norm.

Yes, because Apple always follows guidelines on that stuff.

Or not. Having HIG and following them are two very different beasts, and I'd be willing to bet that GNOME, at least, does a better job of following its own HIG than does Apple.

I'll nominate Rob Enderle of Enderle Consulting as a raving looney.

In the classic Finder, there is no abstraction between the actual file system and the view of the file system presented on screen. A folder is either open or closed. If it is open, it is represented on screen in its own window. The size, position, and viewing options for an open folder's window are always remembered, and are unrelated to the size, position, and viewing options of parent, sibling, or child folders. There is a clear, cohesive paradigm at work. An open folder is a window; a window is an open folder.