Arlo, there is a man on MacOSX who claims to be a close friend of yours. He said that people inside of Apple contacted you, and either got you builds of Tiger with Dashboard on it, or showed you it or something along those lines. It was also heavily implied from this "friend" of yours that you based your whole crappy implementation of Konspose on what you have on Tiger.
As far as what I've heard about you being fired, I've been told from developers that have met you, and probably still know you. Will I go into any further details about it? No. I don't want to say anythingmore about what I do and do not know.
What I can tell you is that your product is a copy of Active Desktop from MIcrosoft, and couple others from Object Desktop. I'm not being snide about it right now, but I don't think you have any room to complain. Apple created Desktop Widgets, and from what I've seen, the only widgets I saw that had ANYTHING to do with your little Active Desktop wannabe product is the Stock Ticker, and the webcam. Your product is a better copy of Active Desktop, but it is a copy nonetheless.
You can't really claim to have never heard about Active Desktop, because Active Desktop is part of the reason why MS got in trouble with the Justice Department, because it is what helped integrate the browser into the Explorer.
You claiming to invent the whole concept of widgets, is like Henry Ford claiming to invent the Car or Al Gore claiming to invent the Internet. You didn't invent widgets as you created them. Your widgets are nothing more then Desktop Accessories, and Active Desktop combined.
Personally, I don't care. I hope you get plenty of pity-party sales. To anyone who knows anything about the computer industry, no one buys your little claim. You can't pull one over on me because I have studied the computer industry for years. I have probably done more reading on the subject then any of your forum readers. For example, Spotlight isn't the first operating system to have this "type" of feature, but it is the most robust one yet. The whole concept that Spotlight has, was in BeOS in the Be Tracker. You were able to search for anything from a centralized interface. I don't know if you were able to group things, but I have done tons of research on the matter. The concept of Spotlight has been around since the late 80's, early 90's approximately. Microsoft was trying to come out with a product that would give people access to their information anywhere, along with building new ways to store data, using meta data, with similar ways of querying it like a relational database. Around 93 (approximately) they canned the product, and put the GUI they were developing for the interface, on a pseudo Win32 API set, and shipped it as Windows 95 in mid to late 94. There were similar features to Spotlight in Copeland from what I have read about the project, but Copeland was so badly managed, and the expectations were so high, that no product at that time could have met what them. The concept your product takes advantage of, is something that was a major buzz word around 96-97. It was a concept called "Push", where information was pushed to the desktop. Pointcast popularized it. Microsoft and Netscape went to war over who would standarize it, and create a platform for it. Thats when the Active Desktop was born. It was part of a platform that was soon abandoned by MIcrosoft, that was Active Desktop, CDF, and Dynamic HTML. CDF was a format to attempt to give new capabilities to HTML, and extend it. Microsoft used their "Adopt and extend" tactic where they adopted HTML 3.2 and 4.0, then "extended" it with their own proprietary html code, that was only compatible with MS browsers. Active Desktop would have taken off better if broadband would have been around, but since it wasn't, it was a massive resource hog. It dominated your modem almost all the time, leaving many to disable it. Microsoft stopped pushing it.
You can't fool me with you saying that there has never been another product like this, because I lived through it. I beta tested it in several forms as well. I love my Mac, but I am not so deluted to think that Apple invented the entire concept on their own. Apple did what they did not because of you, but because they are staying competitive. Microsoft is rolling out a new form of your claimed innovative "Widgets" in Longhorn in the form of the Sidebar. Don't go claiming that you invented the Sidebar too, because i've seen concepts of it since 97 of what it's going to do. I can go on for hours on this subject. Like I said, I lived it.
Reality Check:
1. Arlo didn't "innovate" anything with Konfabulator, just did a better Active Desktop.
2. Al Gore didn't invent the internet
3. Henry Ford didn't invent the car
4. Neither Apple nor Microsoft invented the GUI (though they did both popularize it)