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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.'"

5 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: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.