So much for remaining blissfully neutral. We thought we'd successfully ducked getting mired in this sort of controversy when that whole Watson-Sherlock flap was raging (yeah, you thought it was odd that such an obvious dramatic plot point never made it onto the AtAT airwaves, didn't you?), but whoops, we got cocky and blinked-- and now this whole Konfabulator-Dashboard thing just smacked us upside the head with an unpleasant wet slapping noise. See, generally speaking, while we really do enjoy conflict and controversy, we like it a lot more when we're watching it from our couch while cradling a nice, big bowl of popcorn; once we get personally involved, well, it's less about entertainment value and more about hypertension and increased risk of stroke. Taking a stance about speculative issues like whether or not Apple will ever ship Mac OS X for x86 is one thing, but choosing sides in a very real, immediate, and emotionally-charged spat between Apple and one of its third-party shareware developers is just... well, let's put it this way: we get enough of that sort of conflict around the dinner table each Thanksgiving.

And yet it's so easy to get sucked in. How does Switzerland do it?

If you're not up to speed on this latest brouhaha (which we find hard to believe, since it's just about the only thing happening on this post-Stevenote Tuesday), there's a CNET article that should give you a pretty good idea. In a nutshell, Tiger's Dashboard feature may be the bee's knees, but two shareware developers claim that Apple ran off with their apoidean patellae, snatched right up from out of their product Konfabulator. Dashboard lets users access a variety of accessory-like "Widgets" (such as a calculator, stock tickers, and world clocks) at the touch of a key, and allows third-party developers to write their own widgets in Javascript. Konfabulator, on the other hand, lets users attach a variety of accessory-like "Widgets" (such as a calculator, stock tickers, and world clocks) to their Desktops, and allows third-party developers to write their own widgets in Javascript.

See the problem? On the one hand we're ambivalent about it, but on the other hand we're not. When the Watson storm was raging, we had to admit that Sherlock 3's new functionality looked and behaved almost exactly the same in some ways, but since Watson was a fairly natural extension of Sherlock's capabilities, it wasn't necessarily the case that Apple "borrowed" something it shouldn't have. With Dashboard and Konfabulator, though, the similarities are a little too striking to chalk it all up to "well, it's an obvious feature, really." Honestly, look at the two technologies and see if you can really convince yourself that they both sprang organically and independently from, say, the Desk Accessories in System 6 or whatever. We're having a really tough time escaping the conclusion that Apple studied Konfabulator, built its own from the blueprints, bolted it onto Exposé's show/hide-with-a-keystroke trick, and now has itself a killer operating system feature at the expense of one of the third-party developers it's so keen to attract to the platform. Will people still buy Konfabulator for $25 a pop when Dashboard comes free with Tiger?

Note that this goes beyond just adding a similar feature. Take RSS support, for example; one might think that the advent of Safari RSS might prompt the same sort of moral outrage from developers of RSS applications, but in his weblog, Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame notes that "the RSS reader in Safari is not a full-featured newsreader" and lacks a ton of goodies present in his own shareware product. Because of that, he's actually happy to see Safari RSS on the horizon, because it'll introduce the technology to thousands of Mac users who may have never heard of it before; those who like the feature in Safari may then go hunting for a more full-featured RSS aggregator and eventually plunk down $39.95 for NetNewsWire. Everybody's happy.

With Dashboard, though, it looks to us like Apple essentially replicated Konfabulator from the ground up (though Apple denies this) and then added a single new twist: being able to call Widgets into existence instantly and then dismiss them just as quickly. But should Apple be lambasted for taking what some of us might consider a flawed implementation of an important idea and making it far more elegant and useful? While we liked the Widgets idea, we've never actually used Konfabulator, because we didn't want still more clutter on our Desktops. Dashboard, on the other hand, is exactly what we want-- but we'd feel less dirty about using it if Apple has at least offered to buy Konfabulator from its developers.

Based on what little we know about this stuff, we doubt that a lawsuit against Apple for this alleged toe-stepping and feature-peeping would be successful (Konfabulator isn't patented; there may be "look and feel" grounds, unless there's a licensing agreement we don't know about), but that doesn't make it right. Ah, well-- at least this doesn't necessarily spell the end of Konfabulator; like NetNewsWire, it just needs some features and functionality that Tiger won't offer on its own. After all, look at Watson! Jaguar shipped with the Watsonesque Sherlock 3 almost two years ago, and the shareware app was still going strong by virtue of being a stronger implementation of the same general feature. And okay, sure, according to the Watson FAQ, the software just got bought out by a "large company" (which MacSlash determined to be Sun), which could be interpreted as an eventual sign of defeat-- or it could show that the product held its own for as long as it needed to until a third party made an offer its developer couldn't refuse. Suppose we'll see Sunfabulator come this time next year?

Oh, and for the record, we personally never thought Proteron had a leg to stand on in that LiteSwitch X-Panther claim...