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Konfabulator Coming to Windows
islandroots writes "Arlo Rose, developer of the popular Konfabulator widget, is moving his application from Mac OS X to Windows. Back when Apple unveiled their next OS, Mac OS X Tiger with Dashboard, Arlo Rose accused Apple of copying his application. 'We're all diehard Macintosh developers here, but we recognize that Windows is the dominant platform,' Rose said in a statement. 'When you have a great idea, you want more than 2 percent of the global market to have access to it.'"
(From the site) Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather. What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of Apple's Quartz rendering. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Mac OS X. The format for these Widgets is completely open and easy to learn so creating your own Widgets is an extremely easy task. For the "skinning" crowd, Konfabulator is a dream come true. You can easily change the look, feel, layout, even functionality of a Widget so that it matches your lifestyle, your desktop, or the pants or skirt you have on that day.
From the article --
:-)
"Even moving to Windows may not ensure Konfabulator free reign. Microsoft plans for the next version of Windows to have a slightly different twist on the same idea. The company has demonstrated a feature called Sidebar that allows access to similar sorts of information in one part of the Windows screen."
That answers your question
Daring Fireball's take: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_kon fabulator
Short answer: Konfabulator is a product for writing little eyecandyful tools in JavaScript, like Weather monitors, calculators, yaddida, yaddida, yaddida. They are _very_ similar to the widgets being offered in the next version of OS X.
Long answer and editorial: Konfabulator is a resurrection of the old Apple Desk Accessories if you used those. This has been used to claim that really, Konfabulator isn't doing anything new, and that Apple isn't stealing Konfab. I find this argument to be malarky. Sure, Konfab is the spiritual decendent of Desk Accesories. And maybe even Tiger's widgets started as a coincidentally parrallel development within Apple. But writing them in JavaScript? The look and feel? The likely base package of Widgets? Come on. The most you can give Apple is that someone started working on a primitive version of a Desk Accesories successor, and someone came along and said "That's neat. Why don't you make it more like Konfabulator?"
DesktopX for Win32 is similar -- I have never used Konfabulator -- however DesktopX allows you to write simple vb (or any other installed scripting language including perl) scripts and attach them to interactive desktop objects.
If interested, check it out www.desktopx.com
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
Arlo Rose is an ex-Apple employee that build Konfabulator based on his experiment at Apple. Steve Jobs would have been stupid to buy his own ideas back from Rose. And same goes with Watson: Sherlock was clearly first on the market.
On the other hand. Apple has bought some cool technology to next Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Pixelshox Technology is one great example. It's been renamed Quartz Composer in Tiger and is basis of CoreVideo.
So Apple will buy great inventions to their OS, but they're not that stupid to buy their own inventions back.
(Sorry about typos, English is not my native lang.)
When there was the Dashboard brouhaha a while back over ideas being 'stolen' from Konfabulator, I got linked to an interesting comparison between the two. It's quite illuminating reading, and should explain some of the performance, um, issues of Konfabulator:I really got the impression that one reason Apple passed over it for incorporation into MacOS X Tiger was because of the low-level architecture not being up to scratch. Instead of using the same, single instance of Safari's rendering and Javascript for all widgets, booting up some monolithic monstrosity for each sounds just... Horrid...
Oh, and the Windows port was apparently announced in December last year.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Konfabulator coming to Windows is old. old news. In fact, that announcement on December 16, 2003 predates the Apple Dashboard announcement on June 28, 2004 by over 6 months. Konfabulator for Windows was even already in beta form at the time of its announcement, so the idea of porting it is definitely older than 6 months before any word from Apple.
It comes down to this: Arlo Rose was porting Konfabulator over to Windows way before Apple even announced Dashboard. The port has very little to do about Apple coming out with a product similar to Konfabulator, it's more about Arlo Rose wanting to tap into the large Windows market.
That's not to say that Arlo Rose is not bitter about the whole thing - he has made a lot of snide comments on the matter - but the fact is that "little desktop applications" have been a part of Mac OS ever since it first came out. Apple has always had Desktop Applications, small applications that take up minimal RAM and do one small thing well, such as a note pad, a calculator, a clock, etc. If anything it is likely that Rose was inspired by Apple, not the other way around.
Sapere aude!
They're ultimately all ripoffs of Apple's Desk Accessories {more info}.
mbbac
Watson/Sherlock
They offered to hire the Watson developer, he turned them down because he wanted to be retro-actively paid for all of his Watson work even though Apple wasn't going to use his codebase for Sherlock.
Konfabulator/Dashboard
Both of these are inspired by Apple's Desk Accessories from 1984.
SoundJam/iTunes
Apple bought SoundJam and turned it into Itunes.
LiteSwitch X/Command-Tab
Please -- this has been in Windows for years. I've also heard it was in Next as well.
mbbac
Apple actually licensed Xerox's GUI tech which implemented some of Jef Raskin's (Apple) pre-existing concepts.
mbbac
Sherlock came out before Watson. Watson cried a bit when Sherlock was updated but then went on to make a better product.
Konfabulator was not first. Apple had desktop widgets quite some time ago. Not to mention Stardock, Karamba and lots of others.
SoundJam was purchased to become iTunes.
LiteSwitch was implementing a feature that used to exist in System 9 and disappeared in OS X. Apple merely added the feature back in. Even without LiteSwitch command-tab worked, the functionality was simply enhanced with the latest version of OS X.
Konfabulator and LiteSwitch are simply a case of outside developers filling a hole that was obvious. OS X did not hit the shelves as a complete operating system. Every version that has been released has added features back in that were missing. Sometimes these features step on a developer's toes. It is sad, but it happens and it should be expected. These developers should be happy they got paid while the feature was missing and move on to the next big thing. It is unrealistic to think that a simple little toy program is going to be a permanent cash cow.
If Longhorn came out without Active Desktop and then put it back in at a future date, would anyone cry foul? This is the exact same situation.
These developers need to face the facts. Their implementation is a copy of an idea that has been around since the 80s. Their implementation is bloated and runs like crap. I know, I used to run their software until I realized it was slowing down both my cpu and my gpu, then I junked the entire mess.
Let them move over to windows, they will be right at home.
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
erm, the guy is being serious. The parent post should not be modded funny. It should be modded insightful. The widgets concept is a derivative of Apple's original Desk Accessories from OS 9.
Dashboard looks similar externally to Konfabulator because both are OS X looking applications, with a glossy theme. Internally, they are different, although some of their feature sets overlap by allowing use of HTML common scripting languages.
Sorry if I'm vague and foggy, but I just woke up. Please feel free to flame and roast this post.
It should be noted that Desk Accessories are a lot older than Mac OS 9. In fact, they are from the original System 1.0 of the year 1984.