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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.'"
Kapsules is similar to Konfabulator, so this isn't a new idea on Windows either. I never used it, but back when Windows had "active desktop" features those were quite similar to what Kapsules and Konfabulator offer.
I've tried both Kapsules and Konfabulator and once you get past the "nifty keen" factor, neither are really all that useful in my opinion.
Aha! thanks, you proved my theory - see my own post saying the same thing just a bit further up.
"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."
I wonder how much time he spent thinking of ways to improve Konfabulator to give people an incentive to use it instead of Dashboard. It would seem from this statement and the article that he just sort of rolled over.
Also, I didn't see anything in the article about it and the Konfabulator website is loading slooooow as hell, but do they intend to coninue developing Konfabulator for OS X? When this originally hit the news there was a pretty large backlash and a lot of people came out in support of Konfabulator. I really hope they don't intend to just ditch them all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought there was already a "Dashboard" for Gnome that has very similar functionality (thought development is slow).
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/
Ultimately, aren't they all just rip-offs of GDesklets and Karamba anyway?
I'm guessing you are talking about Hypercard.
All in all, its not really even a new paintjob as much as it is just a different engine. I had hypercard apps that could do all the same look and feel with the right free externals (remember -- the original Myst was written in Hypercard -- it still looks as beautiful today as it did back then).
This is what pisses me off about the whole Arlo Rose They Stole Mahhhh Idear bit...he was part of the team that was developing ideas like this at Apple. Its not like he didn't know this stuff was already available to the public. He changed the engine to one of his own (actually I heard it was a reappropriated BSD'd XMLHTTP engine -- which is cool if thats what happened as the BSD is intended to allow folks to do almost whatever they want with the code, unlike other licenses that force one to take specific actions based on others morality) and put it out there.
And now he claims that ANYONE doing the same thing is a thief and a plagerizer because he had the idea to rip someone elses idea off first. He's not complaining about people ripping of his app...he's complaining about ripping off his idea of ripping off apps. Its the whole slashdot joke of I Patent The Idea of Pattenting Ideas that got old years ago...
Fuck Arlo and Fuck All Ya'll...
uses the
Apply actually has a long history of destroying those developers that would help promote their OS. Here's a few examples: (3rd part app listed first, Apple newly introduce "feature" second)
a m/iTunes (the one time they hired someone)
/. cries foul. Apple essentially just steals the whole idea and integrates it into their OS package, and no one cries foul.
Watson/Sherlock
Konfabulator/Dashboard
SoundJ
LiteSwitch X/Command-Tab
It would stand to reason that Apple is killing off their own developers by usurping the projects they undertake, why? Because they've actually been here before. Remember when the Mac was stagnant at system 6-7.5? Not much really changed. Then 8.0 came out and Apple got into a better habit of releasing real changes on a regular basis.
I think though, there's a bit of a double-standard amongst what geeks perceive what MS and Apple are doing. MS buys out open source or 3rd party developers, and
Granted, I do understand there's more than just that in play, but it really kind of irks me when I see the editors gleefully talking about the latest Apple feature or product. It's like rooting for the underdog in the face of cats; you're still rooting for something other than what your target audience is concerned about.
How's that saying go about "everything old is new again..."
Did Apple's original idea involve easily developed add-ons for Desk Accessories (that's what the original was called, right)?
You're thoroughly misinformed. Konfabulator is based on Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript Engine. A stock SM build runs about 424K. Go ahead and double the size if you include Konfabulators hooks into Quartz and other standard Apple API's (a more likely, it's another 100K). Design-wise, Konfabulator uses XML & JS to define layout and functionality of a widget; nothing terrible here as Apple made a similar design decision in Dashboard (their format is slightly different). I don't think several instances of 850K binaries is all that bad. Sure, it could be better but don't you have at least 512MB in your Apple box? I have 576MB in my G3 iBook 500Mhz. The XML for both platforms is relative similar to HTML so you come to a point where the largest difference comes down to widget designers. If a widget designer makes a poor decision in keeping large images around in memory, that's a designer's fault and not Konfabulator's. Also, Konfabulator is available for MacOSX 10.1.x and newer (newer versions only support 10.2.x or newer). Dashboard, well, we have to wait until Tiger goes gold for Dashboard to go gold.
Again, memory bloat of is a function of design decisions, not Konfabulator's design.
Bud Tribble was usually on an even keel, but one afternoon in the fall of 1981 he came into my office, unusually excited. "You know, I've been thinking about it. Even if we can only run one major application at a time, there's no reason that we can't also have some little miniature applications running in their own windows at the same time."
c in tosh&story=Desk_Ornaments.txt
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Ma
A couple of weeks ago, the following clause was added to Apple's developer program agreement:
You can view the full agreement by going to connect.apple.com and clicking Join ADC.
At that point in time no one had been seeded developer previews of Tiger and Apple kept very quiet about the features. It is certainly possible that Arlo found out early about Dashboard somehow, but it's not probable that he did.
Anyway, it's his right to complain about it but there is nothing he can gain from doing so except making himself look like a whiner. He has just got to move on, port over to Windows and/or make a better product than Apple's stuff.
Sapere aude!
Konfabulator was not originally Rose's idea by any stretch of the imagination. This idea first came to light in the mid 1980s with the introduction of Desk Accessories. If anything, it's sorta like the idea that the MacOS was originally Apple's idea. Neither is an original idea, and each got the idea from another source.
I did, however, Konfabulator for a while, and just found the way that it handles as bothersome as the original desk accessories that cluttered the desktop--not very intuitive at all, just maybe looked a bit more fancy. However, the dashboard coming out under Tiger looks like it resolves the "clutter" issue, and would definitely a more preferential choice for me anyways.
"There are 10 types of people in this world--Those that understand binary, and those that do not..."
One major difference to point out is that Konfabulator widgets have to be JavaScript, but Dashboard widgets can include Objective-C extensions.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."