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Dashboard Not a Konfabulator Rip-off
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.'"
The article is a good response I think, though not official from Apple. It points out how they are different, why they didn't buy Konfabulator, and why they didn't steal anything. The idea for these widgets is ancient, think 1984 and the first Mac OS.
I do wonder about Watson though. It was the app like Sherlock 3. Apple awarded the developer best application of WWDC 2002, then went on to show off the clone at WWDC 2003 with no acknowledgment. Sure, it made logical sense for Sherlock to move in that direction, but to not even give credit after recognizing the developer one year past always seemed odd.
On the flip side, you have the KHTML group loging life since Apple swooped in and helped their project. Is this a lesson Apple is trying to teach, in that if you create a good open source project, they may help it along and use it. Create a closed source app, and they simply duplicate it if they want it in the OS?
First, look at the Apple Developer Connection Inside Macintosh: Devices Device Manager chapter on Writing a Desk Accessory. Next, read Netscape's Sidebar Developer's Guide. Then, read the Konfabulator Widget XML and Javascript Reference documentation. Finally, read Apple's own marketing description of the Dashboard technology. Now, do Dashboard and Konfabulator sound to you like two unrelated descendants of Desk Accessories (on parallel branches), or does it sound to you like there's a progression in development technologies from Desk Accessories to Sidebars to Konfabulator to Dashboard?
Next, ask yourself this question: if Konfabulator were made by Real Technologies, and Dashboard were part of Windows, would the DoJ be investigating? Even if Apple isn't copying the technology of Konfabulator, they are clearly poaching on Konfabulator's market. Now, there's nothing either illegal or immoral about this - that's the way business is done, sometimes - unless you happen to be a monopoly trying to drive competitors out of business.
Apple's position is not as a monopoly trying to fend off potential competitors, but as a platform champion which SHOULD be trying to expand its market share by expanding the capabilities and the desirability of its platform. By embracing Open Source and UNIX-based technologies, Apple seemed to be moving to expand its developer base and thus the capabilities and desirability of its platform. Apple could choose to be offer a wide-ranging alternative, or it could choose to marginalize itself in the pursuit of total control over its niche.
So it was depressingly stupid marketing of Apple to introduce Dashboard at WWDC. The audience of the WWDC isn't an audience of potential dashboard widget developers - they aren't HTML/JavaScript folks. The audience of the WWDC are independent developers - and they were treated with a wonderful object lesson of how Apple treats independent developers who try to improve the platform and introduce new technologies with the potential to increase the adaptability and desirability of the platform: Apple crushes them in a Keynote. Adobe dropped Premiere because of Final Cut Pro - and we all thought it was OK (I thought it was OK; I have a copy myself) because Final Cut Pro is a better product and is focused purely on the Apple Platform. MS is dropping IE, probably because of Safari - and we thought it was OK (certainly I thought it was OK) because Safari was based upon an Open Source framework (KHTML) and was giving back to the community, and IE is IE - it controls the market, it's Goliath, and it was good to see Apple give us a David to root for. What are we going to do when Apple goes after Alias, or BareBones, or Intuit? Probably root for Apple. But when Apple crushes all the Arlo Roses of the world, who's going to be left to write software for our precious Macs?
When Tiger comes out, I plan on using both. Konfabulator will be used for widgets that display weather/stats and Dashboard for interactive Gadgets.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Moz & Firefox may have better implementations than Safari, but I totally disagree about IE. Its box model is so completely borked (width includes padding & content, which is in explicit violation of the spec) I don't know where to begin, and just from personal experience I've often found that sites I develop primarily using Safari tend to translate to Gecko painlessly, yet require much more tweaking to get right in IE. I think there's a significant difference between having a standard partially implemented, and a standard incorrectly implemented.
Can you elaborate on the 'height' part?
A good example was the LabelsX software for 10.2, giving the 10.2 finder labels support, however it was obvious labels would be added in eventually, and hence the labelsX software was made redundant by 10.3. Apple simply reimplementing something they already had.
Application switching, same story, OSX already had it, giving it a gui was an obvious direction, an utter no-brainer, every other OS has a very similar looking app swapper. Apple's implementation is not a copy of the 3rd party app as it's the same design theme apple use for all their instant menus (50% transparent black square with rounded edges, containing an item at 128x128 pixels with a drop shadow) same as eject, volume & brightness. You can't accuse apple of copying the look of a piece of software when this software was immitating the look of Apple's own OS X. Many other applications also implement these design cues, such as Synergy an iTunes addition. (Rating popups etc are all in this theme.)
Now come konfabulator, which found it's way into my trash can due to the widgets filling the screen with info that doesn't need to be cluttering my desktop 24/7, the programmer has confused quick access with desktop persistance. It was natural for apple to take some more of their older technology, in this case Desk Accessories and reimplement it (down to using the same accessories as seen in screenshots from builds from 1984). While some might find this convenient that apple chose to implement something that is known to be popular, I point you to apple's introduction of handwriting recognition from the newton into 10.2. This wasn't a popular 3rd party app, and no 3rd party application was trampled by this feature which would be used significantly less than dashboard. Yet apple introduced it anyway, why, because they have the technology and might as well use it. I can't make it clear enough that apple has a trend of reimplementing all their older features into new versions of OS X. It gives users no reason to stay on any older Mac OS, and we all know that the transition to X was a big deal for Jobs. Dashboard's implementation, specifically the use of making it one-button accessible is apple's understanding that accessibility is not the result of placing things on the desktop, they had learnt this earlier on(alot of windows on the desktop, and they can still be difficult to access) and from this knowledge came exposé, naturally dashboard is an extension of exposé.
Arlo has basically duplicated the original desktop accessories, with no innovation(only modernisation), they behaved the same way as the originals, they just sat there on the desktop. As a minimum, apple have added some innovation by giving the user control of their appearance and disappearance through exposé
I feel Arlo gives himself too much credit with konfabulator, not only was the idea not new, but neither was the concept of using Javascript to power small simple desktop features. This was also completed on numerous platforms long before the release of konfabulator, to insinuate that his idea was original is flattery, and an explaination of how the patent system gives out tech patents despite endless streams of prior art.
The visual resemblence is the result of what happens when you duplicate the look and feel of OS X in your applications. He did after all work for Apple in the UI dept.
So now take Apple, reimplementing yet another older feature into OS X, why shouldn't they license it, simply, because they already made this feature long before konfabulator, albeit OS X even existed. How insulting to the original inventor, to pay money for an idea he had implemented some 20 years ago. If anyone should be paying royalties, it's Arlo. If he had a case for a patent, then he'd already have it, but due to the loads of prior art, he doesn't. (plenty of patent sponsors out there wanting only a %.)
So what we see in the end, is not a corporate giant mugging the little guy, closer inspection shows that it's actually just a case of arlo taking something old making it shiny(literally, that's all he did), then pretending he owned the concept+idea all along.