Ewgh. David Pogue trying to be funny again. I wish he’d stop that—it gives me nightmares for a week, particularly on video.
The “widgets/gadgets” thing in particular annoyed me. I can’t speak for where Vista’s might have come from, but Apple’s Dashboard was heavily borrowed from Konfabulator, which called its programs “widgets.” Apple”s Dashboard developer documentation refers to them as “gadgets.” But they’re all just an evolution of the desk accessories that earlier windowing operating systems had, including the Xerox PARC project that Jobs and company copied so much of for the first Macintosh operating system.
This sort of evolution is why the creative commons is so important, and why patenting ideas is so problematic.
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Date: 2006-12-18 03:38 pm (UTC)Ewgh. David Pogue trying to be funny again. I wish he’d stop that—it gives me nightmares for a week, particularly on video.
The “widgets/gadgets” thing in particular annoyed me. I can’t speak for where Vista’s might have come from, but Apple’s Dashboard was heavily borrowed from Konfabulator, which called its programs “widgets.” Apple”s Dashboard developer documentation refers to them as “gadgets.” But they’re all just an evolution of the desk accessories that earlier windowing operating systems had, including the Xerox PARC project that Jobs and company copied so much of for the first Macintosh operating system.
This sort of evolution is why the creative commons is so important, and why patenting ideas is so problematic.