One of the “new” features Apple is introducing in Tiger is ***”Dashboard”|http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html***. Dashboard allows the user to display “widgets” on their screen, which contain information like weather reports, stock quotes, the current time, the current track in iTunes, etc. Sounds good, right?

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, Dashboard is, shall we say, remarkably similar to an existing product: ***Konfabulator|http://www.konfabulator.com/***. The Konfabullator makers have noticed this, and have posted their feelings ***in their blog|http://www2.konfabulator.com/journal/index.php?start=68&show=1***.

This is remarkably similar to Apple’s behavior when redesigning their Sherlock web services software. Find a really cool, useful program (***Watson|http://www.karelia.com/watson/***), then take its functionality and integrate it (poorly) into the Mac OS, without giving any credit for the idea to the people who actually came up with it. In Watson’s case, Apple still hasn’t done much to improve Sherlock, and it is definitely not up to par with Watson in terms of usefulness. In the latest chapter, Konfabulator is far ahead of Dashboard, and my guess is that it still will be once Tiger is released 9 to 12 months from now.

Well, I suppose not everyone can have their greatest ideas come to them as if in a dream.