Well, Apple’s done it again. They’ve seen a really cool (but simple) idea implemented in a third party shareware app and they’ve *ahem* been inspired by it to create some new functionality in the new version of Mac OS. This year’s victim: Konfabulator. A short article at Mac Critic outlines the other “inspiration.”
If anything Konfabulator is “copying” ideas Apple has used for years. The only thing Apple did was go back to the old way of doing things and JavaScript support. I hardly see where Konfabulator’s huge innovation is. Additionally, in a commercial product the development cycles are much longer, I imagine Apple’s been working on something like this longer than Konfabulator’s being around. Now if Apple’s willing to come out and say otherwise, then I’ll believe it, but until then it’s heresay to claim otherwise without any proof.
Well, this proves that all companies to dark stuff, whether it be Microsoft, Apple, or my local bakery.
I might also add that Stardock had the ability to do these things long before Apple and long before Konfabulator even existed. So who’s copying whom?
The link is dead.
Well, Wolfman, see: Yesterday it might have been Eugenia, but this was posted by David… 🙂 Hard fact o’ life…
OK, so cute graphics that do things on your desktop are now owned by Konfabulator? I know there are underlying aspects to this, but just think of how UNORIGINAL this all is. Are you going to yell at gdesklets because they get packaged by a Linux distro?
I can understand people wanting the support of the little software developer, but Apple is taking a good idea, implementing it, and will make cash. Isn’t that how products work? Don’t you see five of the same product on TV, from five different companies? Whatever happened to the line (paraphrase) “Imitation is the more sincere form of flattery”?
I think there is just a holy-war surrounding these people because people love to flame corporations. Help the little guy. Which is all well and good, but not if their ideas aren’t anything special. Oh, and plus I will get these features without annoying pop-ups after X days telling me I should buy Konfabulator for $25. Sure I pay $130, but thats not exactly the only feature I will get in Tiger.
I think Konfabulator, as software, is great and people can/should/will pay for it… but the idea, that is free and should remain as such. I, for one, welcome our apple-eating, dashboard overloards.
Shareware seems to have a long history on the mac. On other platforms software that is mentioned here is at least availiable as freeware. In my optinion Apple has to integrate these tools into the OS. I beleave that otherwise “switchers” get annoied about this “apple-developer-licensing” paradigm to charge 20 $ for every little line of code written. Don’t get me wrong I do understand that it is not that easy to create software like confabulator, shapelifter etc.. But should mac users really pay for that kind of software. These kind of things are availiable for free on other platforms. gDesklets IE.
I’m a mac user since 1999 and I spend a lot of time on OS 9. In those days the situation was even worse.. Mac Developers charged for everything. Since the transition to a unix core and the ease to port apps to the Mac at least things got better.
I use gentoo, bsd, windows and osx.. and OSX is definatly ahead of Time.. but please developers don’t charge for everything you are a segnificant annoiance factor for peaple from other platforms..
(English is not my mother tounge please respect that)
The latest showing of Apple’s dashboard compared to Konfabulator is pretty bad, but come on! How can the developers just sit there with Konfabulator and not think Apple was going to pick up on it! They should have known it would be in their OS sooner or later.
Why is the guy so bent out of shape? Oh my god, now he actually has to improve the product or move on to another concept. He should be thanking Apple! The developers can now drop the idea and go onto something better and even more innovative! I would be pissed for like a day tops, then move on to the drawing board and show them up even more.
I’m sure end-users have been sending feedback for Apple to put something like this in their operating system. Personally I think Apple is just addressing the needs of users who has brought this helpful feature to their attention. Simple as that!
But when it comes to the bottem line, business is business and there’s nothing changing that. Move on!
As far as I understand, it binds a hotkey to a bunch of applets like calculators, stickies, stock tickers, weather reports, etc. They slide in and out of the screen like Expose. What I don’t understand is, how is this better using a windowmanager with true multiple virtual desktops? You can then just open and leave any calculator, stockticker or whatever app you like on one desktop and bind a hotkey to that. There isn’t much difference except the sliding effect, is there? So what’s the big hoopla about this Dashboard thing? If anything, it only highlights OSX’s lack of multiple desktops.
How is incorporating alt-tab plundering? This is a feature that many ‘switchers’ have waited for. If anything, it was plundered from MS.
While the implementation of Dashboard is disturbingly similar to Konfabulator, how do we know whether this hasn’t been a planned feature that wasn’t implemented. As I understand, the Konfabulator creator worked for Apple at one point.
Watson is the only legitimate gripe of the three.
As for the article, I’d like to see more direct information on how Apple’s applications compare to the third-party applications. I’ve seen more coherent and thought through ‘articles’ in Slashdot posts.
The point here is that when Apple does this, they don’t even communicate with the company which they are about to put under. MS oftentimes would at least buy the company and then implement the technology afaik (sometimes not though, I admit). At least this way the original developer would be compenstated. Not so for Apple.
This is a huge elephant in the room for Mac developers.
I might also add that Stardock had the ability to do these things long before Apple and long before Konfabulator even existed. So who’s copying whom?
I think everyone was coping Apple, as I had stardock/konfabulator funtionality on my Apple II (in apple works), my Mac plus, and my Apple II gs (GEOS).<P>
Also, Konfab can still be useful to those who aren’t upgrading to Tiger – I have a g3 running 10.2.8. It will continue to do so.
I would still use Konfabulator over what Apple is putting in. I would hope that other Konfabulator users would do the same. They have done a fine job of creating a toolset to create those fun little widgets.
Maybe now that Apple has done this to them, they will put more time on the Windows side so that I can finally enjoy the benifits of Konfabulator on my Windows XP system.
I aplaud Apple for making a better product, some of the new features in tiger (like automater) are nearly enough to get me to buy a Mac, but you have to admit this is a blatent ripoff. The least they could have done is compensate Konfabulator with some money programming them out of buisness.
The point was made somewhere yesterday (I don’t know but take no credit for it) that it’s a lot cheaper for Apple to pay a couple of developers for a year to develop something similar to Konfabulator (which is cool but not that complicated) than to take an alternate approach. Sure Apple could buy the company or buy the product, or license the product, but each of the approaches the legal costs alone are higher than developing it yourself. Plus the internally-developed version may integrate with the OS or other products better, and it’s a one-time cost with no complications, as opposed to licensing IP.
That’s the business side anyway … I still think Apple owes the developers of Konfabulator something.
Konfabulator always sort of reminded me of IE’s Active Desktop and Pointcast (remember back in ’98 when you could get whatever content you wanted right on your desktop!) though. Or HyperCard. Or Applescript. Or XUL. Or a bunch of other client-side scripting technologies.
And where does the article get off with categorizing “Lite Switch X Known as Alt-Tab in Panther” as plunder? Sheesh, one button is not an application. Plus all of this was copied from Windows 3.0 (or earlier versions, I don’t remember).
There are lots of other apps where the situation is fuzzier. Like “Dave” which used to be the only way to do Windows file sharing on a Mac. It was great. Even through OS X 10.1 it was basically a necessity in a Windows environment, since Apple’s Samba implementation was unusable until 10.2. Now there’s not much need for Dave any more.
Not exactly stealing … Apple implemented Samba, they didn’t reverse engineer Dave … but the results for Dave’s developers are similar. Microsoft and Apple do this kind of feature-stealing all the time, as we’re all I’m sure aware.
October 1981
See System 1 – Desk Accessories
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Desk_O…
“… one afternoon in the fall of 1981 he came into my office, unusually excited. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. Even if we can only run one major application at a time, there’s no reason that we can’t also have some little miniature applications running in their own windows at the same time.”
Don’t get your panties in a wad on this one – it’s theirs.
Hopefully no one will “invent” the “About Box”, it’s theirs too.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Credit…
And Rhythmbox isn’t a ripoff of iTunes? And Window List in Gnome isn’t a ripoff of the Windows Taskbar? And Mozilla’s pop-up blocker isn’t a ripoff of that feature from OmniWeb?
It sucks for Konfabulator. Of course, name one thing you use on a computer that hasn’t been copied from something else. Yeah, Apple stole it from them, but are you against that? Should Konfabulator been allowed to patent their software to protect it from Apple? Should Microsoft have been allowed to patent the taskbar? Should Microsoft been allowed to patent minimizing windows? Should Apple or Xerox been allowed to patent the GUI entirely?
Is it just me, or do some of these latest Mac OS features look a little like those of their best OS, Newton OS 2.x… I think the real conspiracy here isn’t Apple stealing from other companies, but stealing from their own past!
Ripping off Konfabulator was wrong, but not for the reasons you are suggesting here. The reason this was a bad move on Apples part is because it reduces the motivation for individuals and small companies to develop for the Apple platform. By doing this, Apple makes enemies of the very people who were it’s best evangelists. I will think twice before creating my next killer app – because the more popular it is, the more likely it will be that Apple will simply make their own.
I understand the argument that some have used: ultimately competition is better for the consumer, but Apple has vastly more resources than your average small developer. They will win every time, but in the end they will lose, because there will be no one left outside of Apple willing to innovate, and then we all lose.
I don’t have problems with companies making similar applications. My only issue with this, is apple can package it with their OS and use that as an unfair advantage. Even if Apple’s isn’t as good as Konfabulator, people will use it because it came with their computer, for FREE.
Microsoft did this same thing with Internet Explorer. If apple didn’t package this product with their OS, but instead sold it seperately, this would be a whole different issue, and I’d have no problem with that.
/Line72
“How is incorporating alt-tab plundering? This is a feature that many ‘switchers’ have waited for.”
First of all, I can’t believe that Mac Critic doesn’t know that it’s Command-Tab. The point is that while Cmd-Tab was always the default key combo for application switching via the Dock (the icon of each running app would enlarge as you cycled through them), its current implementation is a direct rip-off of Liteswitch’s method, with the transparent overlay. I used to use Liteswitch and in my opinion, it was far superior to how Apple did it at the time. Apple copied it; they made it better, but it was still a blatant copy of Liteswitch. The same with Dashboard and Konfabulator.
This isn’t anything new. Wasn’t Windowshade a 3rd party app before Apple incorporated it into Mac OS 8? I seem to remember quite a few ‘new’ features of Mac OS 8 being available as shareware for System 7. I wonder if Apple paid the original creators anything back then.
Lets face it, Apple’s GUI design hasn’t been particularly innovative for quite some time. Expose is very nice and there are some clever touches in Mac OS X, but most of it’s GUI comes from NeXTSTEP or classic Mac OS. Still, it’s better to have a usable GUI than a more innovative design that’s pretty much useless (such as most 3D UIs).
Everytime I look around these days I see people crying about making software free. It takes time to develop good software and for many, they’d like some financial return on that time and product. Get over it!–some software is just going to have to be purchased.
I’m not understanding why everyone is attacking Apple for making this move with their Dashboard! First off I don’t think anybody in this comment section can prove that Apple was first to develop this concept or Konfabulator was the first to create it. Frankly, Apple and Konfabulator both could be ripping off the original developers.
The point I’m trying to make is everyone is just grabing a knife and stabbing someone. You all are just acting and making blind statements on an idea that you have no evidence that shows anybody was the first to develop.
Konfabulator probably was first to throw this down on the Mac OS, but that doesn’t make them the “creator” of the concept!
Is it sad, yes. But where do you think these OS developers (Microsoft, Apple, Red Hat, etc…) get their ideas – from third party developers. Apple is not stepping on ANYBODIES feet for this improvement.
Plus Tiger is still in it’s early stages, it’s not coming out until first quarter of 2005. So the dashboard we all saw at WWDC yesterday could be just the beginning of that idea. Apple can easily make even more creative and useable then Konfabulator could ever have done! This drives Konfabulator to be MORE creative with their product. Is it bad to have a little competition – I mean what huge advancements has Konfabulator gone through since it was released? It’s still the same, it probably just grew in the GUI aspect.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m sure that WindowShade was licensed by Apple.
don’t use OS X yet but can someone tell me the difference between Konfabulator and Karamba for KDE? From what I have heard both due roughly the same thing though karamba for all i know uses python instead of javascript.
Boy, after the shrill cries of “Fake!”, I bet there were a lot of red faces when MacRumors’ screenshots of Dashboard proved to be the real thing. Where are all the “experts” now? Hello? Anyone?
Well, I don’t care to admit: I was wrong.
Luckely I’m no authority on these kinda matters
it is pure trolling, Microsoft always copy Apple and Apple is not dead
If we do the same for microsoft, OSnews will be full of news…
If they wanted to hold onto their concept as original, they should have patented the idea. Whats that, oh yes, someone already did it before them.
Guess that sorts that one out. Now why exactly are we listening to the Konfabulator people fabulatoring accusations that they got ripped off?
It amazes me that all these so-called ‘reporters’ just quote these guys verbatim without even researching the facts.
I believe it’s too interesting and too much fun to bash Apple to bother with the truth.
well maybe not beyond words, I own a 17″ iMac and 12″ iBook and am going to dump them and go back to Windoze, Apple are worse than Microsoft at least you knew that they were unscrupulous b**tards, but this sort of behaviour from Apple is very very very sad… what a bunch of wan*ers.
Apple should compensate, rather than rip off. Damn, I mean, that is as cold as the crap Microsoft does. This isn’t the first time Apple has ripped ideas and boasts credit for what results, look at their entire BSD core that they so smuggly love to say is stable and reliable. But when it comes to giving credit to the FreeBSD folks, they instead brand the BSD they use as Darwin, and rarely if ever give credit to the hard working folks who made the basis of OSX possible. To hell with Apple, long live open source.
Microsoft is facing stiff anti-trust measures in the EU for putting a media player into their OS, and yet despite numerous pieces of evidence that this isn’t harming competition, many here believe MS should be fined and their OS dismantled and given freely to the public.
When Apple demonstratively steals a third party application, regardless of whether or not Desk Accessories was similar (that’s like saying baseball and cricket are similar because they both use a bat), and people here defend Apple’s practices. It is clear that Dashboard is far more akin to Konfabulator than to Desk Accessories.
I think it’s time to have Apple investigated for anti-trust violations seeing as how they have a clear monopoly in the Mac computer market and they regularly pull stunts like this, removing competition in the market.
…if you’re pointing fingers at people ripping off things…
…hadn’t you better point that same bony finger at Konfabulator itself?
After all, everyone knows that if you spell your programs’ name with a capital K, it’s *supposed* to be a KDE app.
They *SO* ripped off that whole “K” thing.
I say, make them change the name to Qonfabulator*!!!
(that way, they’ll only tick off the Klingon Language Institute.)
———–
*this is a satirical post. It’s a joke. If you don’t get it, you’re probably an accountant or a member of the ACLU. Get over it.
>I think it’s time to have Apple investigated for anti-trust violations
Anti trust violation with 3% of market part ^^
Your joke is funny!
Konfabulator is a copy of karamba, but on karamba site I don’t see konfabulator start your photocopies…
What a silly program.
It would be funny if Apple computers had been considered part of the PC market during the Microsoft anti-trust trial. If Apple is considered a market unto itself then it has 100% of the market unless you can show me a PowerPC clone manufacturer that exists, anymore at least.
Ok, so repeat after me PC = Personnal Computer.
Apple is a Personnal Computer…
Apple *make Personnal Computers… sorry ^^
Sad to see that Apple copies ideas from other developers and incorporating as their own ideas. This is sad because they wont let other developers do that on them.
Apple owns several patents on their *ideas* (Trashcan icon, exposé, spring loaded folders… the list grows very long[1]) so that nobody else can make similar programs as they do.
If they would like to copy ideas, then they should allow others to copy theirs…
[1]http://www.macobserver.com/editorial/2003/03/04.2.shtml
blah, blah, blah! Someone took my idea, someone copied me. What did everybody suddenly become first graders! Welcome to the real world folks.
I agree with another person who commented this . . . If Konfabulator wanted it’s idea to be safe . . . . file a patent and get your money as the creator. Since they didn’t, they are either; 1. not the create (which they aren’t), or 2. didn’t file.
Apple doesn’t owe them a thing.
Darn that Winn-Dixie for creating a Cola beverage when for so long they sold Coke and Pepsi! Now they are practically giving it away at $2 a case instead of $4! I am so mad at them for creating competition!! Oh wait! No, I’m not.
Why doesn’t Konfabulator just compete now that there is competition?? They should make their product better and point out the differences and keep innovating.
Umm…. Apple DOES give credit to the BSD community. They state right on the OSX website that their reference platform is FreeBSD 5.0, and if you can’t grok that to mean that they’re giving credit to the BSD community, you need your head examined. They named their BSD core Darwin because it is NOT just BSD, it’s BSD + Mach + Samba + CUPS + gcc + NeXT + Apple.
Troll.
I agree that Apple makes personal computers but Judge Jackson did not because they use PowerPC CPUs and not the x86 architecture. Therefore, one could argue, based on the Microsoft anti-trust trial, that Apple holds a monopoly on the PowerPC Personal Computer market and their actions are that of a predatory monopolist. Konfabulator is ony the tip of the iceberg.
I understand what you are saying but it is their fault if nobody has take a RISC processor on their computer. They have PPC, ok it is just a processor, anybody can do another RISC processor to concurrence them.
AMD has not the same architecture of processor so they are monopolist of AMD processor ?
It is just a processor, a piece of the computer, i don’t think we can tell that Apple is a predatory monopolist.
++
I can’t believe that till this day people still don’t see the difference between Apple and MS. Its apple’s hardware and apple’s software. Short of setting a developers office on fire Apple can do anything it wants to. I say more power to Apple. This stuff should be included in the OS. I don’t want to have to pay for silly little stuff. I’ve been a user of Konfabulator for a long time. I always wondered why it was not part of the OS. When I used ObjectDesktop on Win98/2000 I wondered why it was not part of the OS as well. If they cam up with the idea, yeah Apple should compensate them but they did not! I’ve been doing this in classic and in windows and in linux for years before konfabulator came along? I have Safari, Firefox, Explorer and Opera installed in OS X. They all browse the web? I don’t hear anyone griping about one copying the other… This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!
I don’t think Apple re-wrote the app from scratch. I think they looked at Karamba, from the KDE world.
Apple has done this before. Safari is or was based on the KHTML engine from KDE.
Maybe, one day, they even copy KDE. Would be better than Finder.
It’s not nice of them, but it’s business.
Maybe Apple can do something for the community: release Cocoa for Linux. That would drive Microsoft nuts.
Imagine all Cocoa apps available on Linux 🙂
Nice to see there isn’t a single response to this…
“October 1981
See System 1 – Desk Accessories
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=De…
“… one afternoon in the fall of 1981 he came into my office, unusually excited. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. Even if we can only run one major application at a time, there’s no reason that we can’t also have some little miniature applications running in their own windows at the same time.”
Don’t get your panties in a wad on this one – it’s theirs.
Hopefully no one will “invent” the “About Box”, it’s theirs too.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Cr…
“
I read many defending Apple, and claiming that they can copy any 3rd software functionality and make it part of the OS. That is clearly a M$ tactic that hurted the Wintel platform into the M$ Office, et all monopoly.
What I find sad is that there seem to be a double standard. As a company Apple has sued for hw manufactures using “similar” colors in their boxes(remember emachines?). Yet they turn around and do this to people that are supporting their OSX. Shame on Apple. They did this to retailers to, with the Apple store. Maybe every sw developer should withdraw from Macs and let Apple built *all* sw and hw.
M$ did this with a huge market share. Apple is now doing it with such a small market share, thus killing the few 3rd party developers that they have. I predict that Apple will hurt itself by doing this and will be reduce to a less diverse than M$ enviroment, akin to close hw/sw platform of the 90 68K markets.
3rd party developers should take Apple to court over this. It is dissapointing to me to think that not only is Apple as bad as M$ but on ocassion worst. So much for creativity, wiped out by greed($).
We saw it the first time, ya know… There’s no need to post it once per page.
Al Gore invented the whole concept in the 70’s. Konfabulator and all that followed were ripoffs.
Apple was first :
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Desk_Ornam…
“Maybe Apple can do something for the community: release Cocoa for Linux. That would drive Microsoft nuts.”
If Apple does this I’ll become a Microsoft-zealot! 😛
Apple MUST do something for the community: a Linux binary layer for Darwin to say “good bye” to Linux on Mac! 😀
Oh come on, you act as if Apple is the only OS that regularly rips off ideas from someone else. maybe a little computer history reading might be in order.
Bill
Here is how it goes for me, CONfabulator isnt anything new. The idea of Widgets has been around for a very long time now. Its just apple decided to add the feature free of charge in its OS. To you happless twits who say “OHHH THey stole it”, guess what! I bet the apple version will run 2 times faster, not crash like the Confabulator does for me and my freinds, and have full open ended support for other fans of widgets to make free ones to add in. Im sorry little stupid tools like CONfabulator are to dorky to have to acutally pay for. Its a stupid little trinket that should be built into the OS free of charge. Im sorry but for anyone who acutally seriously uses Confabulator, nice way to waste your money.
Now in rebuttel here is the thing if Confabulator was an open source project and free then i would have a little bit of a gripe about it, but when some digbat charges 19.95 for a little crappy time waster program like that i say sod off. The only shareware app I have bought for my macs is that Sailing clicker which is well worth its cost. Its usefull at home for watching movies on my tv. At work Im able to fully control keynote for small presentations, like one i recnetly did on how we could provide a free open network for Annapolis Maryland and get a tax shelter as long as long as we make it cover the whole area of downtown annapolis harbor plaza as well as the poor areas.
Now if apple stole that idea for Sailing clicker, I could understand a shit storm at the door of 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino. Till that time if it ever happens I tip my hat to apple for creating such amazing new updates and making my job as the unix admin and tech support guy for my little job a little easier and much more fun. and god thank got i love Apple Remote Desktop 2.0 The VNC support is so freaking AMAZING!!!
This was a design paradigm they used back in the Classic Mac OS days, which they decided not to carry over until now. With Mac OS X, they abandoned many interface tweaks and workflow paradigms (people still don’t like the Finder in OS X) that Classic Mac fans loved, and proceeded to forcibly bar developers from making interface tweaks.(http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55395-2,00.html?tw=wn_story_pa…)
Then they begin to implement tweaks to the OS X interface that third party developers had managed to come to market with first. In this particular case, they implemented a feature that a third party had come up with first, in largely the same manner, when there are at least 3 other more powerful scripting languages that I can think of (not including AppleScript), that they probably could have adapted for this purpose. It appears this is just another in a series of bad moves by Apple along this course.
…that they “imitated” Watson with Sherlock. I still use Watson (for the record) and don’t use Sherlock. :/ No matter what improvements Apple may make, Watson is just better.
Mike