Tom has written up his first impressions of Apple’s forthcoming OS, Tiger. He summarises thus:
All in all the big news for the operating system is the integration of search and metadata technologies into the heart of the Operating System. The Safari RSS and iChat AV stuff is pretty cool too and everything else looks like tweaks, gimmicks or outright rip-offs.
The latter point refers to the outright rip-off of Konfabulator. As Matt puts it, ‘at least when some other companies rip something off they have the decency to buy out the original.’
I would also echo Tom’s thoughts on Launchbar (another Tiger rip-off) with my feeling about Quicksilver. Quicksilver feels completely at one with the OS and I use it all the time without thinking: command-space, f, w to launch Fireworks for example. Incidentally, Quicksilver has just been updated to beta 25 with some architecture changes and bug fixes.
Some of IBM’s staff are blogging publicly on the developerWorks blogs page, focussing on their specialist subjects such as management of software development, business-level tooling, Renaissance jazz and of course Mark Pilgrim on making emerging technologies accessible.
Richard Keen wrote:
Yes, although Konfanulator was a rip off of apple’s old desk accessories and active desktop.
The thing about konfabulator is that the guy was basically selling an open source javascript engine with a GUI wrapped round it and some frameworks, but the widgets themselves could only be given away for free as they’re javascript and therefore inherently open source. True that it’s a look and feel rip-off though.
They’ve beat Microsoft to a meta-data database file system which is very big.
Veerle Pieters wrote:
First I love Konfabulator and have it running on my Mac but they aren’t the innocent victims as they appear to be. This link: http://www.xpthemes.com/forums.asp?MID=19&CMID=19&AID=4472 should put some perspective on Apple stealing Konfabulator. This program was there 3 years before Konfabulator.
Rich wrote:
A nice rebuttal from John Gruber of the Dashbound v Konfabulator “ripoff”. Dave Hyatt also weighs in with a reality check.