June 28, 2004 2:28 PM PDT
Developer calls Apple's Tiger a copycat
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Arlo Rose is outraged at the similarity of Apple's Dashboard, previewed earlier Monday by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, to his Konfabulator, a $25 Macintosh program. Both programs allow easy access to small programs called Widgets, which can perform a number of useful little tasks.
"It's insulting, is what it is," Rose said in a telephone interview. "They could have at least offered to work with us or to buy it."
Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Computer
Apple previews next Mac OS X"The goal isn't to be like anything else," Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller said in an interview. "It's not his stuff. What we've done is ours."
Rose and co-creator Perry Clarke released Konfabulator in February 2003. "There really wasn't anything like it when we came out." Now, Rose said, a number of copycat programs are on the market.
By treading closely on outside developers, Rose said, Apple risks killing the incentive to write Mac software. "Why should developers want to work on their platform?"
Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Computer
It is not the first time Mac OS X has stepped on what some see as other's turf. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., previously expanded its Sherlock search tool to add features such as movie times and yellow pages in a format that closely paralleled a third-party tool called Watson.
Rose is trying to make the best of the situation, taking advantage of the fact that Tiger won't ship until next year.
"Cupertino: Start your photocopiers," reads a newly erected Konfabulator home page. It also asks, "Why wait until the first half of 2005, when you can get the original Dashboard now?"
In the long run, though, Rose knows that he will have a tough time competing with something that is a built-in feature of the operating system.
"We're either going to have to move to another platform or work on some other project."
See more CNET content tagged:
Konfabulator,
Apple Computer,
Steve Jobs,
photocopier,
dashboard
software (although I wouldn't of heard or used it until this
article.) After reading the article I downloaded and started using
the software. It is well written and looks almost identical to the
dashboard feature in tiger. I guess we will have to wait and see
what the folks at apple do next.
How different in concept is what Rose did with Dashboard from Pointcast or one of a dozen other previous ideas?
Of course, it does speak a bit to the hypocrisy of Apple to do exactly what they thought MS was evil for doing to them ... then again, they lost the lawsuit against MS -- if you can't beat'em ....
Also it's very ironic that they would display this technology at a developer's conference where they are singing the praises of their OS and asking these folks that have paid for the privelage to attend this conference to continue to write programs for their platform.
Konfabulator 1.7 is released with it's biggest new feature being a
copy of Apple's Expose. Days later Apple announces Dashboard,
which is a copy of Konfabulator.
So what's the problem here?
Konfabulator is cool (I use it), but it's not an original concept.
-mpm
Korn-y-fabulator and buying Panic's new release. Mr. Rose
must be from a communist country perhaps? He wants to be the
only player with his product, guess he's afraid of competition.
Heck, can you imagine a world with only one OS, only one
financial software, word processing, presentation, only one
computer in the store, 'cause there is only one store to choose
from.... Grow up ARLO! I've uninstalled Kornfabulator.
know how old are you but reading your articles/comment you
look like teenagers.
I would like to remember you that the Desktop Accessories, aka
DA, quite lost in the night of times, were an original idea of the
fabulous team that developed the venerable System 1. When?
On January, 1984 dear milk suckers. Those original DA were:
Calculator, Alarm Clock, Puzzle, Key Caps, Control Panel,
Notepad, and Scrapbook.
I'm sorry, Konfobulator didn't invented the DA, they only --and I
like/love how they did it-- implemented, in a more fashionable
way, what Andy Hertzfeld (at first), Jef Raskin, Bruce Horn, Bud
Tribble, Steve Capps, Bob Belleville and Bill Atkinson invented.
Never speak before having known!
/Stefano Lesandrini
Read 1 Kings 21.
Al
project=Macintosh&story=Desk_Ornaments.txt&topic=Software
%20Design&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium
Apple didn't steal this concept, look or feel. It's been theirs
since 1981 and has appeared in every Mac OS except OS X since
1984. Until Exposé was developed, Apple didn't have a good
way to re-implement it. They tried docklets, they tried toolbar
apps, nothing caught on. Konfabulator got the presentation
right, but it was never their idea.
or 3rd generation enhancement of a concept invented at Apple
20 years ago. There seems to be some crying over spilled milk
going on with the developer, but the bottom line is "YOU didn't
invent widgets".... Now, go whine about something else. You
need to get original and not merely be in the business of fine
tuning the inventions of others. If you don't, you're in for a lot
of disappointment in the Software industry because there will
always be someone who has a different way to do the same
basic tasks.
MSFT and the Mob have known it's cheaper in the long run to do it that way.
I guess Apple is new to the "problem fixing" business.
- Konfabulator riped from StarDock!
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by
June 29, 2004 2:43 PM PDT
- StarDock has been making widgets since OS2, these are the guyes that started all of it. I run both Windows and OS-X, and I wish that StarDock released there software for Mac! The guyes at Konfabulator need to give dues where they are due. Dont say that Apple ripped you off when you got everything from StarDock!
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