When you are the developer of an OS, you have to be conscious of the strengths and weaknesses of your system. Granted, if you have a good developer base, any weaknesses in the way of absence of certain widgets will be overcome by the community; but when do you decide to incorporate such widgets into your system, killing the work of the developer and thus feasibily fostering ill will?

This discussion was catalyzed by the article eWeek: Mac ‘Widget’ App Set to Make Windows Debut. The author of Konfabulator, a much acclaimed Mac app that allows on-screen “widgets” to be developed, has recently developed the app for Windows, understandably out of frustration due to Apple’s planned inclusion of Konfabulator’s features in Tiger via what Apple is calling Dashboard.

And as the article pointed out, this isn’t the first time Apple has done this. An application named “Watson” was recently shoved aside by enhancements included in Sherlock 3, and the updated application switcher in Panther ripped off the features of “LiteSwitch X”.

Frankly, you can go further back into history and see this phenomenon occur several more times. It might almost seem ridiculous to mention them, because the included features that obsoleted certain third-party apps are so common in modern operating systems. For instance, back before Mac OS had these functionalities built in, there were apps or system enhancements for (a) putting a clock in the menubar, (b) having hierarchical menus in the menubar, (c) screensavers, (d) email clients, (e) 2-button mouse support, and other enhancements.

Is Apple wrong for incorporating enhancements into its system that have already been developed by third-party developers? To consider the answer to this question, think about what people said about the Mac OS before Apple adopted some of these enhancements. For instance, before Apple provided built-in support for 2-button mice or screensavers, many Mac critics would argue the deficiency of the Mac because of the absence of these features. The fact that these features were available externally as third-party add-ons was irrelevant to the critics. To their credit, that was understandable; a particular platform could appear underdeveloped if features that are common in competing platforms must be searched out and installed, rather than being present and available out of the box. Far be it from us to impute Apple’s ill will toward developers when it takes some of the most simple and innovative enhancements and incorporates them into the Mac OS. Indeed, this really is a necessary part of Apple’s survival as it maintains the “modernness” of its OS.