I haven’t poked my head into the Dashboard versus Konfabulator brouhaha for two reasons: firstly, I’m not a user of Konfabulator (looked at it, decided that it used far too much screen real estate for too little functionality, and that was that); and secondly, the whole thing seemed patently ridiculous to me.
However, John Gruber — who is far more qualified than I am to expound upon such things in any case — has done a masterful job of explaining why this is really a non-issue.
A sliding puzzle. A calculator. A clock. A little notepad. Tiny little applets — little pieces of software that are something less than full applications themselves, but which run alongside real apps and are easily accessed at any time.
Obviously, Apple ripped off the idea for Dashboard. Stolen wholesale, without even the decency to mention where they took the original idea.
Which, of course, would be the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh — conceived by Bud Tribble and engineered (mostly) by Andy Hertzfeld.
[…]
The post-WWDC peanut gallery is atwitter with the idea that Tiger’s Dashboard is a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator. You can’t read anything about Dashboard without hearing that it’s a Konfabulator rip-off.
Bullshit. Dashboard is not a rip-off of Konfabulator. Yes, they are doing very much the same thing. But what it is that they’re doing was not an original idea to Konfabulator. The scope of a “widget” is very much the modern-day equivalent of a desk accessory.
The Mac community needs two things: more commentators like Gruber, and more people who listen to commentators like Gruber.
iTunes: “Goddess” by Soho from the album Goddess (1990, 5:13).