Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dashboard Not a Konfabulator Rip-off

Posted by pudge on from the so-sayeth-thou dept.

MacNN writes "John Gruber says the origins of Apple's Dashboard technology, announced as part of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger earlier this week, are not with Arlo Rose's Konfabulator, but with Apple's original Desk Accessories and that Apple's Webcore-based implementation will allow many more developers/designers to create 'gadgets' much more easily and that Dashboard's 'gadgets' will offer much better performance: 'Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they're doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a 'widget' is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory.'"

11 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If it walks like a duck, by Theoden · · Score: 3, Informative

    That's dogcow, not cowdog. :)

  2. CSS3 & more! by jadriaen · · Score: 4, Informative
    Furthermore, the Widgets in Dashboard will be using CSS3 (says David Hyatt of the Safari team at Apple):
    As for many of the animations, fades, slides, etc in the widgets themselves., they simply look so damn cool because of Safari's rich support for CSS3 used in conjunction with DHTML.
    Todd Dominey of What Do I Know asks himself wether the technology used in these Dashboard widgets is actually similar to MS ActiveX, but that horrible question gets answered by Hyatt as well... in a positive way.
    1. Re:CSS3 & more! by gabe · · Score: 4, Informative

      They're talking about Safari 2.0, which is going to be part of Tiger, which doesn't come out until next year. The CSS implementation David is talking about is obviously not the one you're complaining about.

      --
      Gabriel Ricard
    2. Re:CSS3 & more! by JimDabell · · Score: 5, Informative

      Moz/Firefox, Opera, and IE 6 are all far more CSS compliant than Safari.

      You are completely and utterly wrong in claiming that any version of Internet Explorer has better CSS support than Safari.

      • Internet Explorer doesn't support CSS tables, a whole section of the CSS 2 specification - Safari does.
      • Internet Explorer doesn't support half the selectors described in the CSS specification - Safari supports all of them.
      • Internet Explorer doesn't support generated content - Safari does.
      • Internet Explorer doesn't support the :hover pseudo-class on anything but <a> elements - Safari implements it properly.

      That's not even counting the bizarre bugs that cause entire sections of the page to disappear in Internet Explorer, and then reappear when you switch to another window and back again. Google for the "guillotine" or "peekaboo" CSS bugs, for example.

      why on earth is Apple using a standard which isn't finalized yet. CSS3 is nowhere close to being done.

      That's wrong too. "CSS 3" is a group of specifications. Over half a dozen are at "Candidate Recommendation" stage, which means that the W3C recommend that they be implemented. A few more are at "last call" stage, which is the stage before Candidate Recommendation, and only major showstoppers can make major changes to the specifications at that stage. In other words, large parts of CSS 3 are stable and ready to be implemented. It's not just Apple that are doing this, Mozilla are as well.

      I can't address your DHTML complaint as you were far too vague. Can you come up with specific examples?

    3. Re:CSS3 & more! by JimDabell · · Score: 2, Informative

      Safari implements quite a few things which Mozilla doesn't (for example, text-shadow)

      As it became apparent that CSS 2 was never going to be fully implemented, the W3C decided to specify a subset of CSS that would more closely represent browser behaviour (in a similar way to HTML 3.2). This will soon be CSS 2.1.

      Amongst other things, the text-shadow property has been removed from CSS because not enough browsers implemented it. So, whilst text-shadow is part of CSS 2, it is not part of CSS 2.1.

      I don't know of anything which Mozilla implements which Safari doesn't.

      Off the top of my head, table border collapsing.

    4. Re:CSS3 & more! by timothyf · · Score: 2, Informative

      IE 5.x doesn't do doctype switching: it is always in "quirks mode". IE 6 will switch to standards-compliance mode with the proper doctype, as long as the doctype is the absolute first thing in the (X)HTML document (i.e. no comments or xml prolog), and the doctype is well-formed. Some more info on doctype switching can be found here.

  3. Re:Decide for Yourself by aristotle-dude · · Score: 2, Informative
    Are you aware that the Javascript runtime engine in Konfabulator is linked against the Spidermonkey engine from the Mozilla project?

    Don't worry, they are not in license violation apparently. It seems that they perform all customizations of the engine and add the system object through inheritance.

    Having said that, their project seems to be inspired by work from the Mozilla project and specifically the XML based skins for mozilla.

    Now if the engine is largely from the Mozilla project and the concept is taken from Desktop Accessories, and DesktopX, should we really get too upset about this.

    If you read Dave Hyatt's responses from his weblog, you would see that they are copying more from Active Desktop than Konfabulator, given that they are going to use new version of Webcore.

    --
    Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
  4. Re:Decide for Yourself by kalidasa · · Score: 2, Informative

    DH's comments are fine *on the technology*; what I'm talking about is the market environment for small developers.

  5. Re:If it walks like a duck, by nwf · · Score: 4, Informative

    Indeed, the dogcow appeared in the Cairo font, and subsequently the LaserWriter dialog. It's been part of Machintosh Developer lore for some time.

    Here is a copy of the original technote providing some explanation:

    here

    And a more current one:

    here

    It's been quite some time since I've seen it discussed anywhere!

    --
    I don't know, but it works for me.
  6. Re:If it walks like a duck, by duck_oil · · Score: 1, Informative

    Here name is Clarus (not to be confused with Claris the software company.) You can read about her here.

  7. Konfabulator - Much Hype, little result... by feloneous+cat · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have been singularly unimpressed with Konfabulator. These are the reasons why:

    1. It has no development tools. Great. If I wanted to fall back to 1980's and position every freaking element by X-Y coords, well... you get the picture.

    2. No suggestions for development tools. Like "Hey, you FIRST need to buy MORE stuff to make cool stuff like this". Yeah, right. Like I need this kind of pain.

    3. "Easy to write Javascript" - if you are a web designer. But anyone else better just pack up their bags and call it a night.

    4. Sucks system resources. For something that is supposed to be out of the way and non-obtrusive, it is #2 or #3 (right below the window manager) in terms of processor usage. OW!

    Apple can only do better much better. After all, they don't have much to compete with.

    --
    IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV