Dashboard rips off Konfabulator

wow - still looking through the [link]widgetgallery.com[/link]. Thankyou apple for introducing this product - if it wasnt for all this controversy youve caused, Id never have thought of this utility, and how useful does it look already! I want!
 
Tiger will be a kick a$$ OS no doubt about it :D Anything else is blah-blah for the sake of blah-blah...

†† AmeN ††
 
Also look at these things this way: Imagine someone introduced a 'telephone' that could be used 'wirelessly' around town. Such a 'mobile phone' would be quite practical. Do you guess every other 'telephone maker' would just _stop_ innovating and let that new guy in town rule the market?

Konfabulator, to many people I reckon, was new. It wasn't Desk Accessories. It wasn't just web services. It was a truly innovative product, let's give them that credit. HowEVER: Can we blame Apple for copying good (and not patented or not even patentable) ideas when earlier we always had to blame others for copying Apple and Apple many times didn't even get the credit? Apple has learned. And Apple is doing better than before. Competition is what drives markets. Dashboard is a good competitor for Konfabulator. And if Konfabulator can't stand the heat, they won't survive.

I criticised Microsoft for similar - but different - strategies. Microsoft often bought a sub-par product and killed better competition by selling the bought product for (almost or even) no price. That was just unfair. But Apple is taking up ideas and does improve. Not necessarily with Sherlock, but quite surely with stuff like iChat, Safari, Mail, iSync and now Dashboard. I'm glad they're doing it. Because that brings people to the Mac side of computers. And that, in the end, brings people to buying Mac shareware, too. If you think you can get rich with inventing a bit of shareware and then stay selling it without ever bringing out yet another shareware product, then you're probably just wrong. Konfabulator is 'open', so it's improved by third party developers. Means: Arlo et al. get money without even improving the app (although they did and maybe will) because new widgets (have attracted) attract new customers. A bit of a self-runner. And it _did_ run and quite certainly sold better than many a shareware product.

Good, Apple! Next up: The MS Office killer? Yes, please!
 
I think the thing that has really irked people here is that this isn't a matter of Apple saying "hey, other people have made MP3 players, let's make a really, really good one!" . They're not simply taking a good general idea and running with it. In these cases they've practically photocopied the original app and tried to pass it off as their own creation. The amount of duplication without value-add was a bit moreso with Watson than with Konfabulator (the only difference I've seen so far is the expose-only thing, which I'm hoping gets dropped before release, which is still 9 months away), but still...

I think it's particularly hit people because in these cases they're not copying the big apps, i.e. cloning MS Office. They're killing the little guy.

It might also be a different story if Apple was selling the product at a competitive rate, but like you mentioned, they're offering these new apps as part of the OS, which is NOT competitive.

At least since Sherlock looks like an unmaintained garbage pile now, users are beginning to be given a reason to take a look at Watson again, which is actually somewhat maintained and works...
 
Quite probably MORE than 9 months... Could be as much as 12. Haven't seen an OS released _early_ in quite some time. ;-) And also: Konfabulator will probably sell more licenses now that people anticipate Tiger and can't yet buy it. Arlo and his team have enough time to decide what to do in order to not only survive but strive... They probably also have access to Tiger, so they could even start and make Konfabulator a BETTER dashboard (and/or dashboard replacement) before Tiger ships...
 
is it true that the guy at Watson was offered a job but declined ???

if yes, how stupid is that ?
 
Just a FYI:
I haven't blogged in a long time, primarily because I've been so busy preparing for WWDC (working frantically on my presentation as well as fixes to WebCore to support Safari RSS and Dashboard of course). I'll be talking about both Dashboard and Safari RSS a lot more in depth (primarily from the perspective of all the new open source WebCore features that were added to support these two new features) once I've gotten some sleep. :)

I wanted to blog briefly to clear up what the widgets actually are written in. They are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple's own web site says "build your own widgets using the JavaScript language", but that's sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing.

In other words, each widget is just a web page, and so you have the full power of WebKit behind each one... CSS2, DOM2, JS, HTML, XMLHttpRequest, Flash, Quicktime, Java, etc. I'll have a lot more to say later on, but I thought it important to clear that up right up front, since a lot of people were asking me about it in email and such.
Click to expand...

From Dave Hyatt's weblog Surfin'Safari
 
They're web pages?! You mean Apple ripped off the Internet, "created" *cough, cough* by one of its own board members, Al Gore? The nerve. Those bastards!
 
DashBoard is based on WebKit+CSS+JS and etc so I recall Konfabulator is just javascript...

now see this blog at Surfin' Safari, which this person posted to make it clear that it is not a rip off of Konfabulator..... http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/


EDIT::: ahh nevermind.. I posted this for nothing...
 
So this is getting closer to "ActiveDesktop" all the time..

This is a good thing. I wonder if you could use it to create a permanent interface for a special purpose Mac, eg, a Cube in the lounge for DVD/DVR/Music/HDTV/etc. Could you make the Dashboard always show, (or set it "lock" open, and need a password to exit) to make sure the interface is always simple...?
 
IIRC Micorsoft first came up with the idea to name a context-sensitive bar on the right side of Longhorn "Dashboard". The OpenSource community immediately picked the idea up. However, the entire idea is quite old and was already available in the form of interactive Docks in several OS distributions for years and years.
 
Everyone go read Dashboard vs. Konfabulator over at daringfireball.net - If this can't put an end to the 'stealing,' I don't know how much good evidence someone will have to put on paper to stop all this noise...

Also - If anyone has their hands on the Dashboard developer kit, I would love a copy :) I can't actually test gadgets until I get tiger, but because the gadgets are just web pages, I can test in safari!
 
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