Whodunnit?

07/07/2004 Jrnl/Software

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"Redmond, start your photocopiers," touts a giant banner advertising Mac OS X Tiger at a recent developer conference. It’s no secret many Mac fans believe that everything in Windows is a poorly-ecexuted ripoff of someone else’s idea, and usually Apple’s. But now, for once, people are accusing Cupertino-based Apple of pulling a Microsoft themselves. The thoughtful question at hand, however, is who are they ripping off?

It sounds to me that Apple’s Dashboard feature is different from other desktop gizmos like Konfabulator and gDesklets is that its gadgets are created using HTML, CSS and Javascript. All of this is made possible by integrating Safari’s rendering engine into the desktop.

Hmmm… little interactive gizmos on your desktop written in HTML, CSS and Javascript, powered by an HTML rendering engine coded right into the desktop? Where have I heard of that before? Oh, right, now I remember. Microsoft did that with the Active Desktop and Active Channels in Internet Explorer 4.0 back in 1997. Oh, and they kind of got sued for integrating their rendering engine into the desktop (among other things).

I’ve been saying it for years: that development team was thinking so far ahead of its time, their ideas will be replicated by others and praised for their originality for years. And what has Microsoft done with this wonderful piece of software since then? Disabled its most brilliant features, and refused to implement the most essential new ones (namely proper support for CSS and transparent PNG images).

What I’m trying to say is that there’s no point in bickering over who came up with what idea first any more. Some countries believe that if a concept can be proven to be a law, then it is itself a property of nature and no one can claim ownership over it. Since many of these features are rooted in fundamentals of interface law, it means no one can claim to have a truly original idea; they can only claim to have a creative twist on an old one.

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