Peter had posted about Dashboard, and the controversy surrounding it and Konfabulator. I've been doing some more peeking into Mac OS X v. 10.4, Tiger, and the more I read, the more I think I'll get it. Part of this browsing resulted in learning a little more about Dashboard. I discovered a link to John Gruber's blog entry about this very ordeal. To sum up, his article states that while Dash and Konfab may do similar things, and may, in fact, both use JavaScript to do so, they way they go about it is entirely different. And if we're going to talk about who had the idea for small-programs-that-do-one-thing-and-do-it-well-as-part-of-another-program, we need to go all the way back to the early 80s and Desktop Accessories. In his discussion, he brings up Watson/Sherlock, and several other similar episodes in the past. He has a follow-up post that addresses some missed-over points, and he summarizes his point better than I can: My point boils down to this: making it easier to write client-side software using scripting languages is clearly something that makes Mac OS X a better platform. That Konfabulator offered something similar first doesn’t entitle them to anything. Both posts are recommended reading for you Mac geeks and/or champions of the little people.

Until next time, I remain.