I’d say that Tiger looks like it will be a worthwhile upgrade. If you weren’t following the WWDC keynote yesterday, the TidBITS summary is a good place to catch up.

It does seem unfortunate that Apple is dissing on the small-developer community again. From initial reports, Dashboard looks like a Konfabulator killer and Spotlight like a LaunchBar/QuickSilver killer. The Konfabulator people have already responded, mimicking some of Apple’s propaganda on their homepage: “Cupertino, start your photocopiers! Why wait ’till “first half of 2005″ when you can get the original Dashboard now?”

In a timely news release, it was announced that one of the original victims of the Apple small-developer-diss, Karelia Software has sold their Watson technology to an “unnamed” large company who would appear to be Sun Microsystems.

A large company has made an agreement with Karelia Software for the technology in Watson. Unfortunately, we cannot disclose the terms of the agreement (hence the lack of the company’s name here, just to keep the lawyers happy). If you are at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, you can see demonstrations of this technology at the Java Pavilion. No formal announcement by this company of any committed product has been made as of this writing, although you can informally track progress on this weblog.

I really like Watson — I don’t use it all the time, but it’s by far the best way to check TV listings on the internet. You can filter all local channels down to just your “favorites”; you can search, and you can actually add a program to your iCal calendar — something I have never used, but which is the kind of clever thinking that small developers often bring to the table. Its integration with Epicurious is also very nice — just a simple adaptation of a search engine to a Mac-like interface, but including photos (where available) and a nice bookmarking feature.

Unfortunately, Watson has to fuel its cleverness by screen scraping, because all those interoperability and Web Services promises still haven’t really come to bear — and that means that most of the cool tools will slowly decay as the data sources change their data in ways that are incompatible with Watson’s screen scraping techniques.

Still, congratulations to Karelia for the chance to sell their work for hopefully a tidy sum. It would be nice if Apple would operate so honorably. (Admittedly, they bought SoundJam to make iTunes, and they bundle several good shareware apps with new machines.)
They could probably afford a bit of recompense to the developers from whom they take inspiration, if only to avoid alienating other small developers.