Dashboard Exposed

[jettredmont]

Using your logic, why innovate? Why apply for patents. I say patents are a waste of time since everything has been invented that needs to be. A car for example, is a copy of a bicycle. I mean, according to your logic, this would be true because a bicycle gets you from point A to B, sure a car does it faster but so what? and by your logic, a plane is merely a copy of a car, only thing it does it gets you from point A to B faster. Your logic are a little on the silly side.

That's because you missed it.

The point is, "idea theft" is not "proven" by a scant set of similarities between products. All products will share similar traits merely due to the fact that they coexist in one marketplace and one world. FTP and HTTP share the trait that they can both transfer files, to borrow the previous example. However, this doesn't mean that HTTP is an FTP "ripoff"; it is different in core purpose, in fundamental design, and in intended audience.

Likewise, the fact that both Dashboard and Konfabulator have a similar set of widgets does not mean one is a ripoff of the other. They differ in fundamental ways, at their very mission statements.

As for patenting ideas ... well, generally the software developer community frowns upon that, while the software suits community loves it. But, in the end, for something to be patentable it has to be innovative in some way. Taking a technology du jour (javascript) and an age-old idea (widget toolkit) does not generally yield a patentable idea. And, believe me, the standards for a patentable idea are absurdly low.

Whether something could be done before is not the issue. The issue is whether the implementation has been done before. IE, man has always been able to tell time but when the clock was invented, it was the first time he was able to tell time without looking at the sky or the stars, etc. An application can be functionally doing something that has been done before and yet be new because it implements it actions in a new way. Unfortunately for Konfabulator and dashboard, this has been done before by stardock. So apple saying "Redmond, start your photocopiers" does not really wash. My argument with you is not that Konfabulator is not new (it isn't), my argument with you is your logic. It's ok to defend apple, just do it without the blinders on. Makes your logic much clearer.

Ummm... okay. I never said Dashboard was a completely new or even a patentable idea. I wouldn't put StarDock as a predecessor of Dashboard (although it is certainly more in line with Konfabulator), but there are several more tenable instances of previous art, the most pertinent of which continues to be Apple's own Desk Accessories. The real set-apart innovation here, which is simple yet killer, is that Dashboard gets out of your way when you're not using it. Stardock doesn't, and Konfabulator doesn't. This isn't a "feature", it is a core difference of approach. I'm not sure if there is a pertinent predecessor there.

On the note of the "start your photocopiers" jab, do you think it may be possible that Apple was talking of Tiger as a whole instead of a specific individual feature of Tiger?

 

[datafatmunger]

those widgets are ugly for eye candy. . .

 

[Freg3000]

I personally think the flip-to-settings is genius (yes, I know it's a rippoff on a Sun idea)

This is not meant to single anyone out, as many people have said it before as well, but why does everything have to be a rip off of something else? Why can't it be that Apple was developing that type of "flip" technology at the same time as Sun, but Sun showed it to the public first. Does that mean Apple stole it from Sun? No! For all we know, Apple may have started development before Sun, but was slower in creating it. There is a chance that neither sides knew about each others concurrent development.

Face it: we are at the bottom of the totem pole, and we know the least about the situation. We just try to form our opinions on the limited information we know. Not to say that we shouldn't try to form opinions, but we shouldn't be wanting to sue Apple and accuse them of ridiculously unethical behavior.

(My Sun/Apple "flip" technology was just an example, it probably didn't work out that way, but it could have.)

 

[tny]

[begin sarcasm]Good thing nobody told Alias about this Konfab-Dashboard stuff. They might be nervous about releasgin Maya Unlimited on the Mac.[end sarcasm]

Konfab is not the best of what's out there - far from it. Write real software... eat cake. Write little things that are logical OS parts/extensions and could be written by any ITT grad... eat ramen.

30 Jan. 1972

Ok, if Konfabulator "is not the best of what's out there," point to a better widget hosting service for the Mac. Don't make apple-and-oranges comparisons between a major developer who's got the resources for a big application that it would not be cost-effective for Apple to and a small developer who's using limited resources in a creative way. (Of course, one could also point to Premiere as a counter-example to Maya).

Maybe you're trying to say that Apple doesn't need small developers; if so, what is the point of WWDC? WWDC is a forum for Apple to talk to SMALL DEVELOPERS. Big developers with lots of resources have their own channels for communicating with Apple. For Apple to demo Dashboard at WWDC without first taking care of the Konfab developers and doing a shout out smacks of really, really incompetent developer relations (comparable to their recent incompetences with Mac resellers). Buying Konfab wouldn't have cost them much, and would have given them a nice little bit of good publicity for WWDC.

 

[whooleytoo]

actually, i am confusing myself... is there a huge difference between quartz extreme and CoreImage? is coreimage just a set of filters?

The way I understand it:

Quartz Extreme consists of two parts, Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositing. Q2D is a 2D graphics API. It (along with QuickDraw, QuickTime and OpenGL) passes it's resultant bitmap data to Quartz Compositer, which takes those bitmaps and renders them onto OpenGL polygons and offloads them to the GPU, which is ideally suited for handling translucency, layering etc.

CoreImage is an API for manipulation of bitmaps, so you most likely will only be using it if you're using a Tiger-requiring graphics or video app. (Then again, who knows what uses developers will find for it and CoreVideo. My first thought was - wouldn't it be cool to use that to send ripples across my desktop picture periodically, or have it shimmer like it's underwater. Very relaxing.. )

 

[30jan-1972]

Ok, if Konfabulator "is not the best of what's out there," point to a better widget hosting service for the Mac. Don't make apple-and-oranges comparisons between a major developer who's got the resources for a big application that it would not be cost-effective for Apple to and a small developer who's using limited resources in a creative way. (Of course, one could also point to Premiere as a counter-example to Maya).

Maybe you're trying to say that Apple doesn't need small developers; if so, what is the point of WWDC? WWDC is a forum for Apple to talk to SMALL DEVELOPERS. Big developers with lots of resources have their own channels for communicating with Apple. For Apple to demo Dashboard at WWDC without first taking care of the Konfab developers and doing a shout out smacks of really, really incompetent developer relations (comparable to their recent incompetences with Mac resellers). Buying Konfab wouldn't have cost them much, and would have given them a nice little bit of good publicity for WWDC.

Better widget maker? AppleScript. RealBasic. XCode. Anything you can make in Koncrapulator can be made in all three of those. And I can make them just as fast. And they will use fewer resources. And they'll likely end up free and sans bloat. Better widget environ? OSX. Native code runs faster.

Simple logic for CC grads: widgets != software.

As to dev size, there are degrees of small. Two ex Apple employees scamming people on widgets is tiny. TINY. RealBasic is small. Ambrosia is small. A couple of guys and their Javascript widget maker are not the target audience of WWDC - sorry.

Did they expect that Apple would never do this? Duh.... Did they expect to get paid for something they didn't think up? Did they expect to get paid when Apple's will not use their code implementation (bloat gurgle bloat)? Whatever.

boo freaking hoo

30 Jan. 1972

 

[stingerman]

TNY Who copied who? Desktop Accessories have always been part of the Mac OS, since 1984 and Apple was the first to allow you to have them alongside Apps. Especially in the days when you could only run one app at a time. In those days you had to program them in assembly and C. Now Apple builds an SDK that allows you to build widgets using Webkit, Expose and Core Image/Video. So what? You could create widget type apps using AppleStudio and Applescript before that.

Being that the core is Webkit, it address a major limitation of Konfabulator, namely integration with other web standards like CSS - something many of us have been waiting for. What Apple did was integrate webkit, so you get Javascript along with everything else. Konfabulator just gives you Javascript, hardly an invention of their own.

Konfabulator should be smart and take advantage of the free press Apple is giving them by legitimizing the space. How many new customers will they get between now and 2005? They could get plenty and extend their features in ways Apple has not yet, thus giving users a compelling reason to buy konfabulator. It is only a fool of a company that views this as a bad thing.

 

[network23]

It's not 'consistent' because it's not supposed to be; these widgets are not your standard apps. They are self-contained little doohickeys that exist outside the dock, menu, and desktop. I personally think the flip-to-settings is genius (yes, I know it's a rippoff on a Sun idea) for precisely the reasons you don't like them: everything is self-contained so you don't need to bother with menus or going to preferences to change the settings. More efficient in my opinion.

I mostly agree here -- are we both assuming that these widgets are unique in that they really don't have a "menu bar", but how much better would it be if they used Apple's current standards relating to dialogs related to an app: the pref windows can either slide out the side or squeeze/unsqueeze out of the title bar (wherever it may be located on the widget). I think it's cool that the squeeze technique they developed for instances when the dialog box is larger than the window it emerges from, is so easily adaptable to these widgets that can be almost any size or shape.

I'm just saying that it's sometimes very important to be able to see the widget in question while you're making changes on that widget. Especially in color/font situations.

 

[craigiest]

bright colors, extra animation (probably optional)

I pray the animation is optional. The ripple effect is ugly and obnoxious. Why does an unassuming little desk accessory like a calculator need to announce itself with a system-wide earthquake? The best visual effects help you notice and understand what is happening. Magnification of the dock allows you to see the items you are interested in while still allowing many small icons in the dock. Genie effect is just a distraction and provides no more usability that the scale effect, so I use the latter. I do not need to have my whole screen shake for me to understand that I have opened a new item. I have no interest in my OS looking like TV News and Sports title animation.

 

[shen]

The way I understand it:

Quartz Extreme consists of two parts, Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositing. Q2D is a 2D graphics API. It (along with QuickDraw, QuickTime and OpenGL) passes it's resultant bitmap data to Quartz Compositer, which takes those bitmaps and renders them onto OpenGL polygons and offloads them to the GPU, which is ideally suited for handling translucency, layering etc.

CoreImage is an API for manipulation of bitmaps, so you most likely will only be using it if you're using a Tiger-requiring graphics or video app. (Then again, who knows what uses developers will find for it and CoreVideo. My first thought was - wouldn't it be cool to use that to send ripples across my desktop picture periodically, or have it shimmer like it's underwater. Very relaxing.. )

my worry is "how much of CoreImage is needed?" since i own two Macs, and neither can handle CoreImage, what will be in Tiger that I simply can't use, or will it be similar to Quartz Extreme in that i will have the function but lose some speed/eye candy? will i not have widgets at all? or will they not have the ripple effect. that sort of thing. be a real shame to not get all that cool stuff when I upgrade a Mac i have owned for less than year to a new OS......

 

[Fender2112]

Didn't Microsoft ...

Didn't Micrsoft demo something similar about a year ago for the upcoming Longhorn release? Seems like I remember them calling it Areo or something like that. You click on a button and the page flips over revealing info about the document. There was also some sort of ripple effect done on the desktop.

 

[egdiroh]

konfabulator did not invent widgets.

IT is really funny seeing the mac worlds perspective to some of these implimentations.
Widgets are a really old concept. they have been around for a long time, and they have had varying deployment frameworks.
The point of the konfabulator framework is to allow for simple devolopment, in fact the initial idea was basically for a simple xml gui scripting language, to make writing small guis easy. The idea got changed to javascript because it is a better language for it.
The point of the dash board is for convience in getting to simple application or performing simple functions. Do you know how much of a pain it can be to get at calculator, if you just need to do a quick calculation?
It makes getting at info in simple apps easier and simple controls for bigger apps easier.
More over none of the apple widgets look like they were copied and it does not look like the frame work was copied, because it looks like it behaves differently.
Really the "copied" things are javascript and widgets. Widgets aren't new. Also konf... switched to javascript, because they realized that it was the right choice for this sort of thing, so you can hardly blame apple for the
same decision. Really all these claims of theft are unfounded. I understand believing them if you have not had a lot of experience with unix or X, but since the writers were working at sun, they should no better then to call this a rip off.

Sorry guys. That's just my gut reaction.

I'm REALLY disappointed, and quite frankly, SHOCKED that Apple blatantly ripped off Konfabulator. They're even calling the apps WIDGETS fer fook's sake. (I don't know the whole story with Watson and Sherlock, but hasn't this happened before?) Unbelievable. I LOVE Apple. I support them 100% in nearly everything they do, but then they turn around and do something so low, like this. I mean, couldn't they have, at the very least, PHONED the developers or something? Offered them jobs? Apple is seen as this great, progressive, friendly underdog of a company. Legally, they probably don't owe anybody anything, but if they want me to think of Apple as a truly great company...They could've handled this a little, well, more friendly.

Maybe I'm overreacting and I'm just failing to see that this is the start of something huge in which EVERYONE starts implementing widgets, changing the way we compute. But right now, I'm not liking the way this smells at all.

 

[logicat2001]

I pray the animation is optional. The ripple effect is ugly and obnoxious. Why does an unassuming little desk accessory like a calculator need to announce itself with a system-wide earthquake?

Remember, this OS is not yet ready or meant for public consumption. If it's going to arrive in the first half of 2005, we've got nearly a full year of development prior to it's release.

What we're seeing today is not the OS that we'll see when we purchase the OS next year.

Best,
Logicat

 

[sethypoo]

Chuckle.

Taken from the Konfabulator website. I'm sure most of you have seen this. Worth a laugh, or at least a smile!

 

[MorganX]

The full screen ripple is totally ridiculous. The sticky flipping is sweet. I like it. I loved it when Sun demo'd it in Looking Glass some time ago. Apple's doing a lot of copying this generation. What's good for the goose.. I don't have a problem with that, I have a problem with Jobs' thinking people are so brainwashable they don't know better.

 

[MorganX]

Didn't Micrsoft demo something similar about a year ago for the upcoming Longhorn release? Seems like I remember them calling it Areo or something like that. You click on a button and the page flips over revealing info about the document. There was also some sort of ripple effect done on the desktop.

they had some effects, nothing as garish as the Tiger Ripple. It's Sun's looking glass that demo'd the window flipping about a year ago.

The good news is now, maybe MS will release a Longhorn Beta with the new UI and effects. They've shown about 10% of it. Now that Apple has blown their wad, they can stop holding out.

 

[MorganX]

this sort of search has long been seen as a holy-grail of sorts for our incresing amounts of data file and folders.. so to say apple are copying MS is wrong, and even if apple were copying MS, it would still be wrong to state that MS came up with the idea or the tech or the implemention.

Correct. WinFS is being built on SQL Server, which ultimately was purchased by MS years ago. Hey wait, iTunes was also purchased by Apple years ago. Well whaddya know, they're not so different after all. Muahahaha!

 

[Mr. G4]

Actually the widget do not stay on the desktop.
You press F12, the screen darken, the the widget appear, then you click on the widget you want to use or change the preference, once you are done click anywhere on the screen beside your widgets and they all disappear in the background...it's like Exposé option of showing the desktop.

The Widgets are on the same concept as the Konfabulator widget...3rd party can develop it.

From the small demo I have seen the Dashboard appears to have the one feature that keeps me from using Konfabulator. It appears that it will be connected to Expose and have its own key so that if I press said key I will suddenly see all of my "widgets" and choose the one that I want to work with. Currently the only way to do this with Konfabulator is to attach the widgets to the desktop and press F11. The problem with this is that you can not see the stuff under the widgets at that point.

The Dashboard solution appears to solve all of these problems.

One last thing, the widgets that are the actual parts of Konfabulator that the user uses are made by third parties that may or may not support and update them. With Dashboard we will have Apple supported widgets that will continue to work.

Frank

 

[iChan]

i'm sureprised that the majority of people on this board thought that the leaked shots were fake, that they could be knocked up in PS in a few minutes... if they can be knocked up in a few minutes, then what makes you think that apple or its thousands of developers and designers come up with soemthing nicer in a whole year? get real about the design... focus on the tech man... that's where the true appreciation of the dashboard lies.

 

[iChan]

The way I understand it:

Quartz Extreme consists of two parts, Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositing. Q2D is a 2D graphics API. It (along with QuickDraw, QuickTime and OpenGL) passes it's resultant bitmap data to Quartz Compositer, which takes those bitmaps and renders them onto OpenGL polygons and offloads them to the GPU, which is ideally suited for handling translucency, layering etc.

CoreImage is an API for manipulation of bitmaps, so you most likely will only be using it if you're using a Tiger-requiring graphics or video app. (Then again, who knows what uses developers will find for it and CoreVideo. My first thought was - wouldn't it be cool to use that to send ripples across my desktop picture periodically, or have it shimmer like it's underwater. Very relaxing.. )

thanks for the description... but i read somewhere that coreimage is like Quartz Extreme x 4... that puts it into perspective.

I think quartz is the technology to actually get the image on the screen... coreimage is a very efficient, cheap (in terms of processor cycles) way to manipulate what Quartz shows.

 

[MacQuest]

thx, are you the same MacQuest that was on Spymac?

That's me. In the cyber-flesh!

 

[tny]

TNY Who copied who? Desktop Accessories have always been part of the Mac OS, since 1984 and Apple was the first to allow you to have them alongside Apps. Especially in the days when you could only run one app at a time. In those days you had to program them in assembly and C. Now Apple builds an SDK that allows you to build widgets using Webkit, Expose and Core Image/Video. So what? You could create widget type apps using AppleStudio and Applescript before that.

Being that the core is Webkit, it address a major limitation of Konfabulator, namely integration with other web standards like CSS - something many of us have been waiting for. What Apple did was integrate webkit, so you get Javascript along with everything else. Konfabulator just gives you Javascript, hardly an invention of their own.

Konfabulator should be smart and take advantage of the free press Apple is giving them by legitimizing the space. How many new customers will they get between now and 2005? They could get plenty and extend their features in ways Apple has not yet, thus giving users a compelling reason to buy konfabulator. It is only a fool of a company that views this as a bad thing.

You don't show any evidence of having read my posting. The point here is that Konfab was designed for lowest-common-denominator users to be able to create their own widgets, NOT PROGRAMMERS. Thus it fits in nicely with the AppleScript philosophy, leveraging a technology that a lot of non-programmers have learned to do webpages. It's very hypercardish in some ways, but is has a "hipper" look and feel than a hypercard app.

 

[whooleytoo]

thanks for the description... but i read somewhere that coreimage is like Quartz Extreme x 4... that puts it into perspective.

Sounds like something straight out of Steve Jobs blog!

I think quartz is the technology to actually get the image on the screen... coreimage is a very efficient, cheap (in terms of processor cycles) way to manipulate what Quartz shows.

Of course, how useful it is depends largely on how (and how much) developers adopt the API. And in particular, how much Apple use the technology in OSX itself. Since they did seem to be emphasising it being real-time, we might be seeing a lot more effects like the widgets 'ripple' effects.

 

[tny]

Simple logic for CC grads: widgets != software.
30 Jan. 1972

Widgets actually can be software. Of course the idea is that Konfab "widgets" can be written by non-developers with a few web-page building skills, even those who think the second and third repetition of "bloat gurgle bloat" is funny. But while many of the existing widgets are little more than spruced up documents, javascript is I believe a Turing-complete language, and so in theory can be used to implement any algorithm within the resources of the system and environment.

The most common definition of software is something on the order of "instructions for manipulating data or hardware." The only other widely-used definition I can think of would consider even data to be "software," so we'll table that for the time being. If a widget performs some application task, like a calculator or a remote control, it's software. Of course a widget doesn't deserve the respect that Maya, or BBEdit, or even a simple text editor deserves, but a widget that performs a task (in contrast to one that merely presents data in a format even vaguely reminiscent of its raw form, as for instance structured markup - XML or HTML - does) is software. A good rule of thumb is that if the application requires a Turing-complete language, the implementation should be considered software. Yes, that makes even some web pages "software" in some ways. But I suuspect that any reputable arguments that can be presented to deny that widgets that perform application tasks are "software" are arguments that can, in changes only of degree and not quality, ultimately be applied to anything beyond bare-metal programming.

By the way, my own education did not include a community college, so if this was intended as a slam against my intelligence or education, I suggest that you reconsider your attitude toward participation in this forum. I was in grad school when some of those on this forum were still in Pampers.

 

[MorganX]

The real set-apart innovation here, which is simple yet killer, is that Dashboard gets out of your way when you're not using it. Stardock doesn't, and Konfabulator doesn't. This isn't a "feature", it is a core difference of approach. I'm not sure if there is a pertinent predecessor there.

Come on now. Tiger looks great. A lot of it is about time. A lot of it is borrowed from other products and OS'. I mean, is anyone really capable of doing anything "that" different in an OS with similar hardware limitations?

Let's see, Clippy, the Office paperclip agent thingy, it got out of your way, automagically, when you were not using it. I remember testing the feature myself. Put clippy in the right margin and yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, yep, he moved out of the way. Someone call the patent office. Innovation at its best. A core difference of approach.