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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.'"
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.
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.
They *did* offer him a job, repeatedly, to work on Sherlock. He declined, repeatedly, seeking compensation for the work he'd *already* done. That's pretty shady if you ask me.
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?
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).
You are completely and utterly wrong in claiming that any version of Internet Explorer has better CSS support than Safari.
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.
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?