"Apple Computer is predicting that rivals will mimic Mac OS X Tiger, but one developer says it's the new Mac operating system that is doing the copying. 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," reports CNet.
"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."
Update: There's now a better account of the kerfuffle at MacCentral: Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC.
Comment: One of the more amusing things about this little spat is that Konfabulator was itself accused of being a bit of a rip-off of a very popular Windows program that came out about three years earlier. In that case, Brad Wardell's real complaints were that (1) Mac programs get loads of publicity while similar or better PC programs like his are ignored; and (2) that he kept being attacked by outraged Mac fanatics "for copying their stuff" when his stuff was out years before. No surprises there.
But while it's not hard to bury Konfabulator under two decades of "prior art," including Apple's [see below], it does seem that Apple is sending out a message: that if you support the Mac by creating popular software, Apple will have no compunction about invading the same market.
Well, Steve Jobs may not have to care about trampling developers underfoot, but this is not the most tactful message to send to the audience at your Worldwide Developers Conference.
Who really invented "widgets" is another matter -- that's a name that was ripped off from Unix. In the 1980s, we used to call things like that Desktop Accessories, and there's a plausible claim that Desktop Ornaments were thunk up in 1981 for the orginal Mac (though this doesn't explain why they appeared in the Apple Lisa before the Mac came out).
Even way back then, however, it didn't seem to be a particularly novel idea: if you had an interface based on a desktop metaphor, why would you be surprised if it had desktop utilities such as a clock, a calculator, and a notepad? Later, the huge success of Borland's Sidekick and similar DOS programs showed you didn't even need a desktop to find the idea useful.
