Stack to the future
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 9:53 pm on 8/16/2004
You don’t remember the dust-up a little while back over Apple’s announcement of a new OS X feature called Dashboard, and its similarity to the third-party product Konfabulator. I know you don’t remember this, because if you don’t read tech blogs obsessively, you never heard about it to begin with, and if you do, well, who remembers back a whole two months ago?
Two things are/were notable about this little skirmish. The first is that the highest-profile argument that Apple wasn’t ripping Konfabulator off was about how Dashboard was totally different - because it used HTML instead of Illustrator files. See? Totally different. Same look, extremely similar default widgets, similar functionality for the user, but because the interiors worked differently, charges of “ripoff” were supposedly off base. What it does is less important than how it does it: a classic example of the engineer’s mindset.
To be fair, though, that article also discusses some common ancestors of exhibits D and K alike. As far as the techie stuff, while I think the look and standard functionality of Dashboard will mean enough to the average user that Apple should acknowledge some kind of debt to Konfab, the technical differences do contribute to a potential tipping-point effect that matters.
Which leads me to the second point: Apple’s power to A) tie Konfab-like functionality deeply into the OS, and B) give it away free with the OS, gives Macs something they haven’t had for a long, long time: a way for moderately sophisticated users to create apps that look as slick as the real deal, and share them.
In other words, it gives them HyperCard.
It turns out that others with more juice than myself have pointed this out recently - and there was a small flurry of interest a few years ago - but HyperCard has been on my mind a lot lately. I was going to write an article about it, but the boiled-down essence of that is below.
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