Widgets or Gadgets?

Apple might have saved itself a lot of grief had the marketing folks stuck with the name used for Dashboard applets in the program itself. I do hope they stick with "gadgets" in the long run myself, not only because I'm fond of that word but because I'm used to referring to buttons and drop-down menus as "widgets."

Apple OS X Tiger preview - Dashboard

There was a good article linked to on Slashdot today, too, that explained that why the front-end user interaction for Dashboard appears mostly the same as Konfabulator, the back-end engineering is different. Basically, the point was that since Dashboard's applets are powered by WebCore, Apple didn't have any reason to buy out Konfabulator, which is essentially a platform for running applets. They already had a platform, a different, OS-specific platform (whereas Konfabulator can be cross-platform), so buying the Konfabulator code would have brought them nothing they could use. The widget interfaces were not part of Konfabulator, and the idea of applets was not unique to that platform.

What really hurts for the developer is not any injustice by Apple but the fact that the new feature will render his separate program superfluous. It's hard to feel pain at something abstract, after all.