Amnesty Goes Open Source and Free

Apr 10, '13 09:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Amnesty, the reverse engineered version of Apple's Dashboard that allows widgets to run on the desktop with Konfabulator-like abilities, has been made open-source and is now freeware.

Originally released in 2005, days after Apple introduced Dashboard with its release of OS X Tiger, Amnesty was built around an engine allowing it run widgets independently of Dashboard, and thus could give additional capabilities to widgets including adjustable desktop level and opacity. The engine also allowed users of OS X Panther to run Dashboard widgets.

Amnesty was released to many positive reviews, including a sidebar mention in David Pogue's Missing Manual for Tiger, but as the interest in widgets waned in the past few years, its popularity and sales began to decline.

Developer Danny Espinoza, who had recently stopped releasing updates for his products sold under the name Mesa Dynamics, felt it was best to release all his software products, including Amnesty (and Amnesty Singles, a widget-to-application converter), as open source as part of their official discontinuation.

Amnesty 1.6 is free and requires Mac OS X 10.4 and later. The application and its source code are available at mesadynamics.com.

[crarko adds: Consider this a public service announcement and a thank you. I used this program back in the day and liked it a lot. I support the notion of developers taking discontinued software and making it open source instead of letting it collect dust (whenever it's practical to do so).]

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