I can say the same in DesktopX's gallery as well, WickedP.
As for Osopolar's comments, it's obvious he's easily confused by buzzword/buzzmoves.
Either Stardock has grudges against Konfabulator, or they're trying to be pointing fun at The Register. |
BTW, Xira, I read your post over on Konfabulator.com. I was going to respond there but they have a tendancy to remove posts they don't like.
I have nothing against Konfabulator. I was using it long before you I suspect. I was one of the people strongly defending Konfabulator's innovation during the Dashboard incident.
But the problem with Konfabulator is that Arlo Rose, like the Register article points out, likes to take credit for things that have nothing to do with him.
For example: http://www.konfabulator.com/cartoon/partFour.html
"It was the coolest thing anyone who had ever used it had ever seen on their desktops.."
By the time Konfabulator came out, DesktopX was 3 years old. And while I'm as keen on weather monitors, stock tickers, web cams and clocks as the next guy, I suspect anyone who had ever used DesktopX, let alone Object Desktop, had seen a lot cooler stuff than Konfabulator.
Konfabulator has been out 2 years now and still doesn't have any native animation support. DesktopX in 2000 still has more features than Konfabulator does today. I'm not arguing that DesktopX is "better" than Konfabulator. But I think it was pretty tacky for Arlo to make the bold claim how cool and original Konfabulator was at release. He seems to have that typical Mac attitude that if it doesn't exist on the Mac, it doesn't exist at all.
According to Arlo's own page: http://www.konfabulator.com/cartoon/partOne.html We even had the IDEA for mini-applets on the desktop. The idea for DesktopX was born in February of 1996 shortly after seeing IBM's OpenDoc based desktop. We thought "Cool, if people could build their own desktops with real objects, they could add all kinds of functionality to it." By the time Arlo was even thinking of Konfabulator we were already in pre-production.
Then in http://www.konfabulator.com/cartoon/partTwo.html he talks about how no one was interested in creating something like this between 1999 and 2001. By this point, DesktopX had been released and been downloaded over a million times just on CNET's Download.com alone and had been featured in countless magazines.
Arlo deserves credit for two things in my book: 1) He coined the term "widget" to describe these mini-applications. We were using the term "object" which was apparently too generic. And 2) He demonstrated the importance of including really REALLY slick examples with the default install. And there's actually a third, more dubious item he deserves credit: 3) If you claim something loudly enough, often enough, people in the media will believe it.
As for Konfabulator being bought by Yahoo. I think it's a mixed thing. On the one hand, it may get widgets out there a lot more. But on the other hand, I doubt Yahoo will be anywhere nearly as effective at marketing it as Arlo has been. And I still believe that gadgets are a much better platform than widgets.
So you could say I'm a fan of the program but not as big of a fan of the way they've marketed it. Next time someone complains about Stardock being overly aggressive or whatever in how it "markets" its software, send them over to those Konfabulator cartoon pages or read some of their press releases.
