Konfabulator vs. Dashboard
Posted on June 30, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 47 views |
This whole topic is certainly stirring up the Mac-web right now. John Gruber has written a rebuttal in defence of Apple and Dashboard that succinctly defines the cool aspects of Dashboard: that it’s built on WebKit, that the idea of having little one-off utils is nothing new, and that it looks as good as Konfabulator is just a coincidence and that really, on under OS X, how could it not?
I pretty much agree, even the bit about using JavaScript as the language to power it instead of AppleScript (maybe that was a cheap shot at Apple but I’m happy to have taken it for a number of reasons).
However his strongest, most vehement argument is that under the hood Konfab and Dashboard are implemented differently. Konfab is custom using XML as its definition. Dashboard is WebKit using DHTML and CSS (read his post for more details).
To this argument I say: so?
As he writes:
I.e., the answer to the question What do they do? is the same. But the answer to the question How are they doing it? is completely different.
It’s the “what do they do?” that’s significant here, not the “how”. It comes down to Apple eating the lunch of a couple of small developers without so much as a side-long glance.
And you know what? That’s fine, there’s nothing to stop anyone from doing that to anyone else.
Apple may be obeying the letter of the law when it comes to the development of Dashboard but it chagrins me to see Apple ignore the spirit.
I agree whole-heartedly with Brent’s comments:
What concerns me is the message the Dashboard thing sends. It goes like this, “If you come up with a good idea and develop a successful product, we might copy it and bundle it for free with the OS.”
In other words, you could be penalized—heavily—for doing a good job, for doing exactly what every developer works very hard to do
I’m old enough to remember an Apple made some effort to embrace outside developers and reward their efforts (how about that Finder?). I miss that Apple, the one that made developers want to build something cool enough that Apple would take notice.
In other news: Watson was sold to Sun and is being embraced as a new cross-platform product.
This date in history two years ago: Apple copied Watson and stuck its functionality into Sherlock.
Huh, how ’bout that?