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.'"

Comments

Even the terminology is not unique

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen a lot of arguments about the bits that apple 'copied' from konfabulator, and some are valid in that there's a lot of similarity between Konfabulator and Dashboard. Similar end function, similar look, similar workings underneath.

But it's all moot when you consider almost none of Konfabulator's implementation of the original desktop accessories concept was an original creation in itself. It might look like a big step to go from the 1984 desktop accessories to Konfabulator... and it is. but even THAT was done before It came after MS's built-in-to-windows Active Desktop, and after DesktopX, both Windows implementations of the same concept.

Good for Konfabulator for being a succesful product, but if Apple were to never use a concept that an external developer had previously used, then we'd have no desktop pictures, sticky menus, stickies, no glassy gui, no terminal, no dock, no onscreen clock, no login system, no web browser, no address book, no email application, no ichat, no full colour icons, no column view, no UI sounds, no font smoothing, no solid window dragging, no fontbook, no developer tools, no disk utility, no iphoto, itunes, sherlock, etc etc etc.

Re:Good response, but what about others?

[cloudness is x]

On the other hand, here is the official response from Arlo, the developer behind Konfabulator.

I think the most interesting point is that he knows about the 6-month head-start he has before Dashboard is available to the public.

What can be done in the mean time? Making more useful widgets. Porting to other platforms (the Windows port was announced in December). More importantly, enhance the application (maybe adding the same appear-only-with-key-pressed), and reduce the CPU load (using WebKit, it might also be possible to make Konfabulator Dashboard-compatible).

Re:CSS3 & more!

[elbobo]

Are you mad? Safari's CSS support is second only to Mozilla, as is their Javascript/DOM support. I know this because I've built an in browser, live CSS editor and tested it extensively across most all the various browsers.

I can even name areas where Safari's DOM handling surpasses Mozilla (although I can name more where it doesn't), and a few CSS instances where Safari beats Mozilla too (although again, more where Mozilla wins).

Opera is up there in CSS, but falls down in some DOM areas, and IE isn't in the race at all. To claim that *any* browser is "far more CSS compliant than Safari" is stretching the truth well beyond breaking point, and the only one you can probably honestly claim that does beat it is Mozilla.

The author of the article is correct.

[dnahelix]

I tried using Konfabulator. At first I thought it was great, then I realized that the mini digital clock was using 60% of my CPU! It made my computer run like crap. Now, there were other widgets that ran without problems and used tiny fractions of the CPU cycles. So I turned of the resource hogs. Then I started thinking about security and decided that since these things could be written by anyone, what might be happening? So, maybe in a paranoid, naive, uninformed decision, I quit using Konfabulator. I also didn't want to pay the fee.

I'm thinking that Apple's architecture for thier widgets would incorporate the security measures already in web based media (for whatever that is worth) The author doesn't really bring up security, so I'm still wondering if it's possible to create a naughty Konfabulator widget that looks like some innocuous tool, but is actually doing bad things. Or could it be done in Apple's new model?

I'm looking forward to it, though.