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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Software Utilities (Apple) Apple

Dashboard Not a Konfabulator Rip-off 83

Posted by pudge from the so-sayeth-thou dept.
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.'"
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Dashboard Not a Konfabulator Rip-off More

Dashboard Not a Konfabulator Rip-off

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  • CSS3 & more! (Score:4, Informative)

    by jadriaen ( 560723 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @11:28AM (#9600273) Homepage
    Furthermore, the Widgets in Dashboard will be using CSS3 (says David Hyatt [mozillazine.org] of the Safari team at Apple):
    As for many of the animations, fades, slides, etc in the widgets themselves., they simply look so damn cool because of Safari's rich support for CSS3 used in conjunction with DHTML.
    Todd Dominey of What Do I Know [whatdoiknow.org] asks himself wether the technology used in these Dashboard widgets is actually similar to MS ActiveX, but that horrible question gets answered by Hyatt as well... in a positive way.
    • The first thing I thought of when I read the announcement last week (Monday???) was the Font DA mover. Man I feel old now.

  • Good response, but what about others? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @11:31AM (#9600291) Journal
    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?
    • all this wouldn't be that much of an issue if they blatantly didn't accuse microsoft copying them("redmond, start your photocopiers" gag). in that light what they're doing is definetely not good sportmanship(yes, in business everything goes, but still - it's not 'OK').

      pot - meet mr kettle..

    • Re:Good response, but what about others? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03, 2004 @11:48AM (#9600393)
      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.

      • Re:Good response, but what about others? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aristotle-dude ( 626586 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @12:16PM (#9600534)
        Well if this is true, I don't feel sorry for him at all then. Come on. Sherlock came out first, then Watson appeared as an extension to Sherlock and then Sherlock incorporated enhancements that made Watson obsolete. Should Apple have stopped development on Watson?

        Come on people, if you leverage technology of another first, especially as an enhancement to their application, you cannot expect to sell your product forever. Two things will happen, either your product will loose relevance due to a shift in focus or the larger company will reproduce your work in their product.

      • Good to know about the job offer with the whole Watson issue. I skim read the article being at work and so I quickly moved over that area of it.

        It seems he got something else now anyhow, Watson users who helped support him after Sherlock 3 are going to be left out in the cold by October.

        I'm not buying a license to Konfabulator because I fear similar will happen. My main holdoff was always the resource issues in Konfabulator. Now I have a second. The widgets were nice when I had a second monitor on my

    • Re:Good response, but what about others? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cloudness is x ( 598249 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @12:20PM (#9600557)
      On the other hand, here is the official response [konfabulator.com] 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).
    • Check out daringfireball.net [daringfireball.net] for a more thorough examination [daringfireball.net] of the whole Widgets vs. Konfabulator thing. The same article debunks the Watson vs. Sherlock issue.

      To quote from the site:

      Most infamously, the Watson/Sherlock controversy. Except note that Apple offered Watson developer Dan Wood an engineering position on the Sherlock team, which Wood declined. This is of course contrary to the popular misconception that Apple "blindsided" Wood with Sherlock 3 (which had been in development before Watson debute

  • Even the terminology is not unique (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03, 2004 @11:45AM (#9600372)
    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.

  • Decide for Yourself (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kalidasa ( 577403 ) * on Saturday July 03, 2004 @12:17PM (#9600542) Journal

    First, look at the Apple Developer Connection Inside Macintosh: Devices Device Manager chapter on Writing a Desk Accessory [apple.com]. Next, read Netscape's Sidebar Developer's Guide [netscape.com]. Then, read the Konfabulator Widget XML and Javascript Reference [konfabulator.com] documentation. Finally, read Apple's own marketing description [apple.com] 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?

    • Are you aware that the Javascript runtime engine in Konfabulator is linked against the Spidermonkey engine from the Mozilla project?

      Don't worry, they are not in license violation apparently. It seems that they perform all customizations of the engine and add the system object through inheritance.

      Having said that, their project seems to be inspired by work from the Mozilla project and specifically the XML based skins for mozilla.

      Now if the engine is largely from the Mozilla project and the concept is t

      • Re:Decide for Yourself (Score:3, Informative)

        by kalidasa ( 577403 ) *
        DH's comments are fine *on the technology*; what I'm talking about is the market environment for small developers.

      • Are you aware that the Javascript runtime engine in Konfabulator is linked against the Spidermonkey engine from the Mozilla project?

        That's very surprising, considering Safari and WebCore use the Javascript engine from the KDE project. Do you have a reference for the Mozilla link?

    • The Market Landscape is wide-open. Apple continues to develop and provide re-usable new Frameworks, specifically in Cocoa and Core Technologies for small to corporate development houses to leverage.

      A culmination of desire, vision, creativity and technical knowledge of these Frameworks will allow one plenty of business case opportunities to become successful. Those that don't become successful either fail and one or more of these criteria and/or make poor business decisions that include partnerships and

    • Re:Decide for Yourself (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 03, 2004 @01:39PM (#9601029)
      The comparison between Netscape-Microsoft and Konfabulator-Apple is not very good, IMHO. Browsers and operating systems are two different things. Operating systems and system enhancements are much closer and one can expect that any OS will encroach any system enhancements market defined by useful gadgets and interface. For example, skinnable OS. In the past, Mac OS enhancement was to include themes. Then some developer used that idea to create Copland-like interface and eventually Arlo wrote Kaledoiscope. Certainly Apple can't be accused of encroaching theme market when it introduced Appearance Manager.

      Fast forward to today, Konfabulator is successful because it was original in a very narrow sense and market. There were nothing like it for Mac OS X. However, if you look at a bigger picture, it wasn't that original. Various implementations of the idea have been around. Add to this the fact that Apple had widgets before, albeit in different forms, for example, Control Strip widgets. Thus, Apple can't be accused of poaching Konfabulator market just because it was absent for a while in Mac OS X.

      IIRC, no controversy stemmed from re-implementation of labels, even though it effectively killed apps that provide work around when labels were missing from OS X. Bottom line is, when you make system enhancement apps to further an idea or to replace a temporarily missing feature, be prepared of getting out the market abruptly. Either that or add amazingly original features to defend yourself.
    • Ok, I'll bite... Dashboard is neat as much as Konfabulator; I'm just wondering how hard on resources it is. You see, when Konf. hit /. I sheepishly proceeded to download it, ohh it, check out the cool widgets! Then I got bored, many widgets bore the disclaimer "hey, I wrote it off a boring weekend!" and noticed the fan humming... I have a laptop, I don't care for a translucent gooey can showing off how fast it's draining my battery. So if Apple's stuff is fast and chews less juice I'm all for it; (sarcasm)

      • Re:Decide for Yourself (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's pretty hard. I used to have 4 windgets running: time zone widget, CD cover widget, lyrics widget and weather widget. Then, I noticed performance hits and when I checked Process Viewers, I found out that each widget run as a separate process, each with CPU and memory allocations on the top of the application itself. Also, there seems to be a problem with memory leak as the performance got worse overtime, which might be due to bad JavaScript/AppleScript code. IMHO, Konfabulator should provide better

    • Utilities and apps (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )
      But when Apple crushes all the Arlo Roses of the world, who's going to be left to write software for our precious Macs?

      I think you are confusing utility and app developers. Utility developers by definition are filling in minor holes in the operating system which they should expect to be filled soon by the actual OS. Quaterdeck made a killing on memory management when DOS & Windows needed it but didn't have it (or only had a bad version). Norton made a killing when disk defraging wasn't included w

  • David Hyatt's comments on Dashboard (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FortranDragon ( 98478 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @12:34PM (#9600629)

    Surfin' Safari [mozillazine.org]

    He makes the excellent point that Dashboard/Konfabulator-type of widgets have been done in browsers, too.

    My comment about Watson/Sherlock [slashdot.org] stills seems applicable: don't whine, give us a better product. ;-)

  • Software Patents (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 )
    Who says software patents are a good idea?

    I think this is a classic example of why software patents are evil. Maybe they are not in play in this instance. This is an example of one of the big boys getting a taste of their own medicine. Lets see if they get a patent for dashboard now heh!

  • Same old story. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by catwh0re ( 540371 ) on Saturday July 03, 2004 @06:33PM (#9602658)
    If you implement some old apple technology, you're on the road to disaster.

    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.

    • I agree. I also used to have Konfabulator installed, and found it a bit unwieldy. (Admittedly, when I had it installed, it was on a 350Mhz G3, so it was slow.) Taking up space all the time just got in the way.

      So when I heard about Dashboard, my first thought was "Another Konfabulator. Cool idea, but not that useful in the long run." It wasn't until I saw the Exposé-like disappearing act that I realized how much it was really needed.

      I missed Desk Accessories. I use Stickies and Calculator alot.
  • Hope this isn't redundant, but what about Gnome's Dashboard [nat.org]?

    It had the name first.

  • The author of the article is correct. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dnahelix ( 598670 ) <slashdotispieceofshit@shithome.com> on Sunday July 04, 2004 @10:28AM (#9605988)
    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.
    • My vague understanding of the system is this: basic Dashboard widgets are just webpages, and as such run as the "nobody" user, giving them zero access to the computer on which they're running.

      It is possible to write widgets with actual native code in them, and those, I believe, need an admin password to install/run the first time (just like any other app).

      For further reading, see Dave Hyatt's webpage [mozillazine.org]. Specifically, his latest post [mozillazine.org] on Dashboard.

      I'm with you on the problems with Konfab. I'm not used to pro
  • Sorry, but does all this matter? Rose said he heard Apple were at work on a 'Konfab killer'. Apple did not need to make this thing. What's bad is that people are still smarting from the Watson-Sherlock thing and they're seeing it again. I don't think it matters if it's a rip-off or not, or if you can even qualify something like that.

    What does matter is that some people will continue to see it as a rip-off, and that's bad publicity and PR Apple should have understood would come.

  • Konfabulator - Much Hype, little result... (Score:3, Informative)

    by feloneous cat ( 564318 ) on Tuesday July 06, 2004 @01:05PM (#9623734)
    I have been singularly unimpressed with Konfabulator. These are the reasons why:

    1. It has no development tools. Great. If I wanted to fall back to 1980's and position every freaking element by X-Y coords, well... you get the picture.

    2. No suggestions for development tools. Like "Hey, you FIRST need to buy MORE stuff to make cool stuff like this". Yeah, right. Like I need this kind of pain.

    3. "Easy to write Javascript" - if you are a web designer. But anyone else better just pack up their bags and call it a night.

    4. Sucks system resources. For something that is supposed to be out of the way and non-obtrusive, it is #2 or #3 (right below the window manager) in terms of processor usage. OW!

    Apple can only do better much better. After all, they don't have much to compete with.

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