Windows Vista is going to be on the shelves for us to purchase in about seven or eight months and one of the features in it is the Sidebar with Gadgets. Gadgets are Microsoft widgets in Vista. They are little tools that float above your main application, though in Vista they can be located in other places.

Some Mac fans like to point out how similar Gadgets look to OS X Tiger’s Dashboard Widgets. Some Windows fans reply that Dashboard was stolen from Konfabulator. I disagree that Dashboard Widgets were stolen from Konfabulator.

Konfabulator is a utility for OS X (and now Windows) that installs an engine and then runs widgets that you can download. These widgets can be created by end users using Javascript and the UI layouts are specified in a custom XML format. Konfabulator was available for OS X before Dashboard showed up in OS X Tiger and some Windows fans say that Apple saw Konfabulator and ripped it off.

The problem with this is widgets were in the original Mac operating system back in 1984 and continued to be in the Mac OS up until OS X was released, which didn’t include widgets.

Wikipedia states about “widget”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_%28computing%29

One commonly referred to type of widgets are the Dashboard widgets of Apple Macintosh computer users. Widgets, in this case, are downloadable interactive virtual tools that provide services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, a dictionary, a map program, sticky notes, or even a language translator, among other things.

The Mac System 1.0, released with the very first Macs in 1984, had Desktop Accessories. These were widgets that acted much the same way Dashboard Widgets act and included a calculator, a calendar, a note pad, a language translator, a dictionary among other things. They had small user interfaces that would not expand or minimize like normal Mac windows, just like Dashboard Widgets. You used a special utility (Font/DA Mover) to install Desktop Accessories. Dashboard Widgets use a special Widget for installing and disabling Widgets. You could download 3rd party Desktop Accessories. They floated over your main applications, just like Dashboard Widgets. Desk Accessories were not regular applications to the end user or to the operating system, just like Dashboard widgets.

Wikipedia about “desk accessory”.

Mac OS X v10.4 “Tiger” contains widgets that are similar to desk accessories in purpose in the form of Dashboard.

The purpose of Desktop Accessories in 1984 is the same purpose for Dashboard Widgets today. Some Windows fans seem to think that widgets have to access the Internet in some way to be called widgets. This is absurd. Widgets were part of computers decades before the Internet was even accessed by personal computers. A large portion of Konfabulator and Dashboard’s widgets don’t even use the Internet.

When Apple released OS X, it did not have a Font Mover utility like OS 9. It did not have pop-up folders. It did not have an Apple Menu that the user could customize. It didn’t have labels. There were many features in OS 9 not found in OS X. Slowly, Apple has added some of those features back into the Mac OS. Apple developed Font Book to install and manage fonts, for example. They put labels back in the Mac OS. Apple also put Desktop Accessories back into the Mac OS in the form of Dashboard. Some 3rd party developers have created those missing utilities for OS X before Apple and when Apple finally puts that feature back into the Mac OS, some of the developers get upset and claim Apple ripped off a feature that Apple had in their OS years before.

Some say that Dashboard Widgets are shiny and polished so they must be ripped off from Konfabulator. Konfabulator is an OS X application using Aqua, like most OS X applications. Aqua is glossy, shiny, polished. Things like anti-aliased edges, transparency, shadows are all part of Aqua and part of every native OS X application since it was released, well before Konfabulator. In fact, the calculator that came with OS X 10.0 is glossy, anti-aliased and shadowed just like Konfabulator’s calculator. So does that mean Konfabulator ripped off Apple’s calculator, or does that mean two calculators using Aqua are going to look similar? Apple didn’t steal that look. Apple invented that look when they developed OS X. Years before Konfabulator, there were all kinds of utilities and applications for OS X that had shiny, polished graphics with shadows and transparencies. Before OS X, there were user interfaces from people like Kai Krause used in Bryce, Kai’s Power Tools, Poser and Infini-D.

Screenshot

So cool user interfaces with shadows was nothing new when Konfabulator came out.

Konfabulator is a collection of widgets using the Aqua user interface running in OS X. That’s all. They didn’t invent widgets. They didn’t invent scripting run-time engines (OneClick was one on the classic Mac OS well before Konfabulator). The technology under the hood in Dashboard is not the same as Konfabulator either.

Andy Hertzfeld talking about his conversation with fellow Apple engineer Bud Tribble in 1982:

(He said) “You’d want tiny apps that were good at a specific, limited function that complements the main application. Like a little calculator, for example, that looked like a real calculator. Or maybe an alarm clock, or a notepad for jotting down text. Since the entire screen is supposed to be a metaphorical desktop, the little programs are desk ornaments, adorning the desktop with useful features.”

“But where do we draw the line?” I asked. “What are the differences between an ornament and a real application?”

“Well, ornaments have to fit into the world of the main application”, Bud responded, “but not the other way around. The main application owns the menu bar, for example, but maybe the ornaments can have a menu when they’re active. The main application would still run its event loop, but it would occasionally pass events to the little guys. And of course you can cut and paste between them.”

Widgets are nothing new.

So some Windows fans like to dismiss the widget similarities between Dashboard and Desk Accessories and focus on one ability the current widgets have, Internet access, and then go backwards and say that Microsoft’s Active Desktop was a precursor to Dashboard. Dashboard Widgets offer the power of HTML, Javascript and CSS, but also Cocoa. They can do a lot of things. The ability to access the Internet is just one ability that Apple’s Widgets have—they are Desktop Accessories in 2006 and have Internet access.

Of course, Microsoft didn’t invent Active Desktop, PointCast did. And Apple had CyberDog CyberItems using OpenDoc before Active Desktop (and IBM was working on similar OpenDoc technologies for OS/2 Warp).

Here’s a 1996 press release from Apple and Netscape:

“With this agreement, Netscape has demonstrated the strength of its support for Apple’s Cyberdog Internet suite and the industry-standard OpenDoc component architecture,” said Larry Tesler, vice president of Apple’s AppleNet division. “With Cyberdog and other initiatives, Apple has been incorporating Internet access directly into the OS and Macintosh applications, so that Internet access is user-content and experience driven, rather than accessible only through stand-alone browsers.

Cyberdog is tightly integrated with the Mac OS. For example, a user can take a Cyberitem (an icon that represents a universal resource locator, or URL) in the Web browser and drag it to the Finder. This Cyberitem can then be used to access that particular resource directly from the desktop. Independent developers can extend Cyberdog by building their own OpenDoc components.”

Here’s an article about the Cyberdog/OpenDoc technology from Apple before March of 1996. This is before Microsoft put PointCast’s technology in IE 4 and two years before Windows 98 shipped with Active Desktop.

Apple’s System 7.6 was released in 1997 with Cyberdog and OpenDoc integrated into the OS.

So we have established:

1. Apple had widgets in their OS back in 1984.
2. Apple had Web components in 1996 and integrated them into their OS in 1997.

Apple stole nothing from Konfabulator.

What’s interesting is how some people think Apple ripped widgets off of Konfabulator but say the new features in Vista (Gadgets, Aero Glass, Parental Controls, Live Updating Task Buttons, Flip3D, Photo Gallery, DVD Authoring, .ics calendar application...) are all evolutions of Microsoft’s own software and aren’t copies of OS X features, or they say Microsoft thought about doing it well before anyone else thought about it.