Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Purchases Konfabulator
NerdyPunk2ML writes "Macworld news has an
article
about Yahoo's acquisition of Konfabulator, which will be announced Monday. Yahoo company executives said they will be
giving Konfabulator away for free, completely doing away with the US$19.95
currently charged for the product. The reason they purchased
Konfabulator was they wanted an easy way to open up its APIs to the developer
community and allow them easy access to the information on the Yahoo web site." From the article: "The acquisition of Konfabulator may not be the last Mac compatible product users see from Yahoo! While Schneider wasn't specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac. 'There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac,' said Schneider. 'We want to make sure we find a way to be more cross platform.'"
I'm sure the fact that Konfabulator's 'buy out price' went WAY down after Tiger, and Dashboard, were released has NOTHING, no, NOTHING AT ALL to do with this sale :)
I doubt this will leave a good taste in anyones mouth
Heh, I know Google will now buy Apple to get hands on Dashboard, way better than konfab... /me fells insightfull
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
konfab is like dashboard and both are like desktop widget and I don't know why I feel that flamewars will start in couple minutes... Konfab x Dashboard: the prior art battle... almost like Vi x Emacs: How many keys can you press at the same time...
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
with dashboard out, just like the article implies, i doubt yahoo will continue making its widgets for dashboard. of course, my comment is kind of an obvious statement...but hey it's 1 in the morning no one should notice.
And the CEO's new job title, "Director of Widget Technology"! What a step up.
I wonder if this is at the urging of Yahoo Japan? Here Yahoo is the most popular portal and search engine. I've heard Mac sales, not including the iPod, are way up so maybe there's some pressure to make things more cross platform?
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
I think Yahoo bought this instead.
pointless javascript based desktop junk.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's just too bad Apple didn't do this. I mean, Dashboard's cool and all, but some widgets just work better _on_ the desktop.
"While Schneider wasn't specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac."
Maybe someone should do a big piece about the resurgence of the Mac?
Aren't these already available as an extra cost upgrade for Firefox?
Extra cost? Idiot. Firefox doesn't cost anything in the first place, unless you're kind enough to order a cd. And no, these have nothing to do with Firefox.
This post's chaptcha: haggle
After fiddling around with the website I found this:
Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to.
Hope that helps someone.
What does your Credit Report look like?
I think it's actually pointless XML based desktop junk :-)
Konfabulator == widgets; desktop thingys made from *ml, javascript etc.
Apple later came up with Dashboard, created the mother of all smokescreens about Desktop Accessories to plead that it was not inspired by Konfabulator and the rest is history.
Apple's behaviour apparently wasn't breaking any law as such but it was the equivalent of some kid leaning over your shoulder and copying your homework. I expect the Dashboard apologists will appear shortly pointing to a piece of FUD called daringfireball, but the question remains:
would Dashboard have existed in the form it does, using the underlying technologies it does, trying to serve the purpose it does and look how it does if Konfabulator never had existed ?
answer: um...ah....oh
I say good luck to Konfabulator, hope they got a good price from Yahoo
While Schneider wasn't specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac. 'There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac,' said Schneider. '
I don't find this surprising. Lately, it seems that Yahoo has been getting some of the positive internet buzz that used to be reserved solely for Google. I imagine that releasing products specifically for Mac users is aimed at garnering similar buzz.
While Macs have a relatively small share of the market, they are, however, well represented among popular bloggers, technorati (ugh) and the mavens of the web: inform or impress these folks, and you will begin to inform and impress the rest of the web. This is a move to grab mindshare.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
widgets isn't a new phenomenon. and frankly, just about everything in modern personal computers isn't either.
we as a people have been copying things from each other since the begining. it is only natural and in fact recommended.
give up those old robber baron notions of "intellectual property" before we get into a really bad situation, like software patents or using holding companies solely to bring lawsuits as a business model. oh wai....t.
the right to have rights. i hear something...
is that you louis armstrong?
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
who the hell modded this "interesting"? if you want to give an informed, reasoned response as to somethings junkitude, fair enough. but no way should this get modded up.
I can't see the purpose of a weather function on the desktop or perhaps a news ticker. All of the clutter of widgets cannot be worth the slight gain in functionality. A well-organized homepage with links/bookmarks should do the trick. A click or two to launch and use a browser are worth saving desktop real estate on a low-res (1024x768) LCD like mine.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
I bought it about a week ago. It's nice, but this blows. How do I look on the bright side of this? I could use that $20.
It should be like this:
I know it is silly - but we always linked on the verbs, and I think we should try to do that more. Then, maybe at least one link to a relevant site is needed to help out the clueless. If we are being shown RAID 101 stories, are we expected to know every piece of software out there?
Get your Unix fortune now!
http://www.konfabulator.com/
I agree, but it's not like had any say in the matter.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, mostly yeah, you are right. Unless you have a permanent Internet connection (and that's a big "unless"). Then things get interesting and you can actually save yourself a lot of browsing and stuff.
This could be THE perfect vehicle to get people to actually use MSN. As a bonus, if they bought Konfabulator, they could release it without worrying that someone might blame them for ripping off Apple, because Apple themselves ripped off the Konfabulator. Please, someone at MSN, I'm a shareholder and I want to hear heads roll.
Not any different than buying Windows, and Linux suddenly coming along and blowing it away.
I'm certain all those Windows users could have used that $80.
---
The "are you a script" word for today is quixotic.
I'm sure the success of Konfabulator does play into Dashboard's existance and current , but I do remember this story on folklore.org about some early ideas for MacOS. It may have been someone at Apple looking at Konfabulator and saying "hey, this is actually doable now."
At what point did MS steal the idea for Active Desktop?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
When Apple makes it transition to x86 will it make a difference if Yahoo has G5 compatible software?
>would Dashboard have existed in the form it does, using the
>underlying technologies it does, trying to serve the purpose it
>does and look how it does if Konfabulator never had existed ?
Meanwhile, other posters are complaining that Dashboard *doesn't* copy Konfabulator and requires (barring developer mode) looking at all of them at once.
Yes, Dashboard would have existed without Konfabulator. Dashboard is based on WebKit. WebKit is part of OS X. WebKit is what powers Safari and Mail's HTML rendering (and probably most other third-party HTML renderers at this point).
http://webkit.opendarwin.org/
Dashboard came at the same time that Automator did; Apple appears to be trying to ensure that their technologies are easy to automate and script into small, useful apps. After AppleScript, Automator, and the various scripting languages on the command line, it made perfect sense to build a javascript/HTML development tool based on WebKit.
I suspect that the only thing that would have changed if Konfabulator did not exist is that Apple would not have called their widgets "gadgets" for a few days.
Jerry
When Dashboard came out, I immediately though of Konfabulator.
This is a great move for Arlo and crew.
biased arent you? thats like saying "bar mitzvah" and pressing the red button
Here it is.
I don't think you understand what FUD means.
Title: The Day Before The Big News
Tomorrow, Konfabulator will enter its next phase of life.
It's not a major new version, or a fancy new set of widgets.
It's the beginning of something big.
When you'll hear us say...
"Excellent!"
"Woot!"
"Hooray!"
"YAHOO!"
Website
Honestely... name another service with so much free stuff (that's actually useful). There's email, fantasy sports, chat, IM, photo storage, stocks, streaming stocks for $10 a month, and the list goes on and on. Konfabulator is awesome, if MicroSoft had released it, it would cost $69.95 in the form of an OS update. Praise Yahoo!!
I know some of you use this product already. What are cool widgets you're running on? I am curious what's out there.
I still run Mac OS X 10.2.8 on my old PowerBook G4 so I wonder if I am missing out with these goodies.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
No need to press a key to use a Konfabulator widget, that is one of the big usability advantages over Apple desktop widgets.
They post this PR, and won't let you download the damn product. The downloads page on the main site sends you to the index of the main site when you click on the download links. I'm trying to download your stupid widget factory, not look at the cartoon of how awesome you are for re-doing widgets on the desktop, you insensitive clods!
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
I personally thought that it was part of KDE without RTFA'ing. Turns out it's a desktop widget thing. Chris Pirillo must be thrilled!
Apple's behaviour apparently wasn't breaking any law as such but it was the equivalent of some kid leaning over your shoulder and copying your homework.
Actually, it's more like being assigned the same problem and coming up with a similar solution. And there's no law against fair competition.
I expect the Dashboard apologists will appear shortly pointing to a piece of FUD called daringfireball, but the question remains:
"FUD" does not mean what you think it means. Also what on earth is a "Dashboard apologist"?
would Dashboard have existed in the form it does, using the underlying technologies it does, trying to serve the purpose it does and look how it does if Konfabulator never had existed ?
Maybe not, but some other product filling the same need, likely in a similar way, would have. Likewise, people wouldn't call foul if someone other than Apple had released Dashboard. People love a David-and-Goliath story, even after David gets bought by Yahoo.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
While I don't care much about Konfabulator per se, it's interesting to see how popular non-browser, web-based mini-apps are becoming. Looks like the first little frothy bit on the wave of the semantic web has arrived. It'll be interesting to see if this ends up generating as much buzz as the last few Next Big Things.
It certainly has the potential to. It's a platform-independent application framework, just like Java-on-the-browser was supposed to be, but this iteration is free from the one-size-fits-all constraints that browser-based development imposed (plus, widgets don't have to be stateless). In fact, this has all the earmarks of a disruptive technology, with the added advantage that it's based on well-deployed standard technologies.. i.e.: stuff Microsoft can't mess with as easily as Java.
And uninstalled it a few days later. It had lots of nice looking widgets that show you stock ticker, calendar, weather, time, etc. However, as mentioned before, all this stuff can be found on your home page, or messnger client, and who needs more stuff on an already cluttered desktop.
Does this mean that Google will buyout Stardock Systems for its Object Desktop? http://www.stardock.com/products/odnt/
People seem to be looking at this from one side. And that's the Mac side. The first batches of comments seem to stem from folks who are keeping up with the Apple/Mac side of things.
While the acquisition of Konfabulator and its removal of the pricetag is great news for all users of the program, do note that Konfabulator, while originating on the Mac, also has a competitor on the Windows side. That side has been dominated by Stardock's own DesktopX application where it's been around for quite a while now.
The news of Yahoo buying up Konfabulator will benefit both sides of the OS platform. Windows users can soon use Konfabulator for free as an alternative to Stardock's DesktopX which costs about US$15 to register/purchase.
~ Old Warriors Society
Maybe Mac in this case simply means not Window, which could imply linux is included?
When google buys something:
"what a great idea!"
"wow, and it's now free! how great is that?!?"
"google is making all the right moves!"
When yahoo buys something:
"wow, that's an terrible and useless buy"
"that's incredibly annoying, who would even use that?"
"that's already a product found in firefox!"
looking at the majority of posts in this story seems to confirm this... sad really.
I'm safe then, because I use a 1280x1024 front-screen video projector and a projection screen as my computer monitor! Right now I'm reclining in my Barcalounger easy chair typing on the wireless keyboard on my lap and using the wireless mouse to my right as necessary. The image of SlashDot I'm viewing is about four feet tall by five feet wide and is about eight feet directly in front of my easy chair. It's great. The high resolution HDTV capable projector I'm using (NEC LT10) cost less than $2,000. I'd recommend this type of setup to everyone. Now, if I pass out from exhaustion while using my computer, instead of falling out of my chair onto the floor - I can simply push back on the recliner, lie back, and fall asleep. :-)
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
...but in the end, I just never found anything that useful.
A weather checking widget? Check. But I have a web browser with a tab to my local weather up at all times anyway.
A package tracking widget? You bet. But I only have one or two packages to track every year. I always have a tab open to that page.
A calculator widget? Of course. But it's still slower than asking google, since my web browser is always open.
Konfabulator (and Dashboard) can do some pretty interesting things, as long as you don't have any other utilities on your machine. Unfortunately, it's unable to consolidate and replace the bunch of utilities that you already have, since you're unlikely to give up big things like your web browser.
I'm sure there are a bunch of people out there that really like it, and find it super useful. That's awesome. I'm glad someone appreciates the hard work that the Konfabulator (and Dashboard) guys did. I just can't find a single useful widget that isn't better implemented or accessed somewhere else.
Ah, there's your problem. You're not supposed to press Esc, v, j, j, j, E, ", +, y, Shift-Down, e, *damn*, k, ", +, g, P and i all at the same time! (Relax, I use it too when I can't use Kate or Textpad or Scintilla or EDLIN.)
Here is a better article on the news: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_stor y.asp?category=1700&slug=Yahoo%20Konfabulator
It says Konfabulator has only three employees!!! Now we know which three households have champagnes popping tonight.
Sun and Fun
1. Aquire widgets.
2. ???
3. Profit!!
Go back to ten years ago when you didn't suck.
Real sorry google came and ownt your ass, but maybe if you weren't so busy trying to figure out where else to jam giant flash ads on your pages you wouldn't have fallen behind.
Go hang out with Excite and Lycos in the also-ran room.
I'm really disappointed Yahoo has left Yahoo messanger to rot on the vine.
No Supermode
No Audibles
No new features for years now.
Yahoo, when are you going to update Messanger for the Mac.
Oh god, how trollishly unfunny WAS that? I'm going back to bed. Sorry. :wq!
Works great for the Windows desktop as well, although it's not THAT practical with the exception of Konpose' or whatever the Expose function is called. I don't know about other people, but the majority of the time I use my desktop, I use it with a maximized window. Probably the reason Microsoft's Active Desktop never caught on.
I have a buddy who wants a Mac (mostly for desktop aesthetics) but is about 3 years away from getting one due to his wife's stranglehold on the checkbook. WinOSX added drop shadows, the icon bar, changed some control panel icons, added menu transparency, changed the window theme, and made the taskbar look sorta like a Mac's, and Konfabulator does the trick with the widgets. Doesn't have all the functionality of a Mac, but whatcha gonna do?
Thanks for the advice, AC. I remember when I had my first beer, enjoy!
What? I know that Slashdotters aren't all on the same page, but most people here generally agree that software patents are bad. Especially the vague, hazy, and overbroad ones that look like obsfucated user manuals (claiming entire kinds of software or user interfaces) rather than looking like nice detailed technical USENIX conference papers. Only Konfabulator wasn't patented.
Now you're saying that even though Konfabulator wasn't patented, wasn't a trade secret, Apple isn't a monopolist, and no part of the Konfabulator code was used by Apple, Apple should be barred from making a similar product? Pray tell, what is this argument based? Should Apple's product suck just so that these small fry can make a couple bucks? Are you saying Apple should do it just to be nice? (It would be nice if Apple sent me a check for $50k so I could buy a Lexus. Just to be nice.) Comparing the free market of the software industry to an elementary school math test is a little facile, eh?
Surely you know, since you pointed to the daringfireball website, that there was nothing in Konfabulator, other than the general idea of JavaScript desktop accessories, that would have been useful to Apple. The reason Apple chose to write Dashboard from scratch is that it could save a lot of system resources and make a more polished product by leveraging existing parts of OS X like Web Kit. Konfabulator was a monstrously heavyweight framework based on Mozilla -- each desktop accessory was bigger than many Mac applications. The people at Apple aren't stupid. If buying Konfabulator would have saved them time and money, they would have done it, just like they bought SoundJam.
Konfabulator made a lot of money on Windows, as well as Mac, and now they got their payday from Yahoo!. No tears shed there, I'm sure.
With great power comes great fan noise.
I find it difficult to look at Konfabulator's widgets and look at Apple's widgets and believe that Konfabulator doesn't have something big to do with Dashboard.
It may or may not make perfect since for Apple to develop a javascript/HTML tool based on Webkit, but one that looks and feels almost identical to Konfabulator? Let's face it. If Windows had done Dashboard, Mac users worldwide wouldn't be able to shut up about how Windows ripped off poor Konfabulator.
On the flipside, if Dashboard's popularity made the Yahoo deal happen (which, come on, it probably did), then Konfabulator probably just made out better than they'd ever imagined.
(disclaimer: typing this in Tiger)
he should have compensate Konfab people reasonably by buying their codes up. Now backed by Yahoo, which I think has more clue than Sun (bought and pointlessly ditched Watson), Konfab can certainly be way more popular than it used to be, even more so than Apple's Dashboard now is. In perception, there's one less Mac OS X EXCLUSIVE killer feature.
I know there's enough TECHNICAL diffirences between Konfab and Dashboard, but I think the idea is the same. Apple admittedly came up with better implementation, yeah I know.
...because the widgets only update when the dashboard is visible.
I share your concern over the need for some widgets when web or utilities work fine. (Wikipedia widget, I'm looking in your direction!)
There's a dashboard widget called SysStat -- pretty much the same as 'top' or 'Activity Monitor' -- but unlike those, it only uses CPU when dashboard is showing. I use this thing an awful lot...
Makes sense that the Konfabulator people would be making a move about now, given Vista's desktop architecture is going to have "gadget" capabilities built in.
People have already been talking in the desktop customization community that gadgets are going to destroy widget apps.
Why Yahoo! would pick this time to invest in a technology that MS is going to "absorb" is a bit confusing, though. Probably another Sonique-style, short-attention-span acquisition.
Since when do Jews blow themselves up to kill others? Could Mr. Towelhead care to bring some examples?
Jews may steal, cheat and barter you down to the last cent, but they don't blow up subway trains.
Did you look in the obvious place first?
Maybe with the Yahoo bankroll they will fix the process and memory bloat that made me throw it away the first time.
A while back I'd tried Konfabulator after hearing some Mac folks rave about it. Basically (explaining for the non-Mac crowd) it was these eye-candy-ful little widgets that would sit on your desktop all the time, showing you the weather, info about an RSS feed, or somesuch stuff. This seemed pretty pointless, since most of the time my desktop is hidden behind all the apps I've got open pretty much whenever my computer is running - but you'd be amazed at the number of Mac users who apparently just leave a blank desktop open so they can stare at it and drool.
Well, anyway - then along comes Tiger, and Apple announces Dashboard. It's Konfabulator done right - the widgets can be brought into view whenever you actually need them rather than having them hiding back on your desktop. Of course after this announcement, it wasn't long before the Konfabulator guys copied the idea of (gasp!) not having the widgets hidden back there - what a concept!
But you know what? Even Dashboard seems pretty pointless. I've got a web browser open all the time, so it's just as fast to click on my weather bookmark, or go to ups.com to track packages, or leave a tab open to my gmail account all the time (after all, if I get a new message I'm going to have to open it anyway). While Dashboard certainly seems to be a better implementation than Konfabulator, but it's still basically an idea that is of no practical use to me. At least the price is right, either way now...
#DeleteChrome
If you want more information (as in a free download of the whole shebang), go get it directly from Yahoo. They've got it uploaded and ready to go, Windows and Mac.
"On the flipside, if Dashboard's popularity made the Yahoo deal happen (which, come on, it probably did), then Konfabulator probably just made out better than they'd ever imagined"
Yup. sometime getting copied in the software business is a GOOD thing. I, for one, never heard of konfabulator untill apple announced dashboard.
If Windows had done Dashboard, Mac users worldwide wouldn't be able to shut up about how Windows ripped off poor Konfabulator.
e ry/default.mspx
Actually, Windows did do "Dashboard" back in 1998, but the widgets were stuck to your desktop, and your PC only had 64MB of RAM, and the stock widgets seemed to be mainly spamish RSS-type newsfeeds, so it didn't seem all that. But it was the same basic idea.
The MS widget list is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/gall
(Wow, there's a grand total of 3 which still work, I'm amazed.)
It was interesting for about 10 minutes and then forgotten (much like I expect Dashboard and Konfabulator to be). As for Mac users, they've shown that they are totally immune to things Windows implemented years before Apple did.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It's not hard to see Yahoo dropping support for their Dashboard widgets now that they have Konfabulator. The question is which one will become the better?
Konfabulator will be free and cross platform. Dashboard is part of OSX. Running both just seems real redundant to me. Konfabulator may attract a much larger following of developers simply because it's available to Windows users, and the fact Yahoo's widgets will at some point only run on Konfabulator (not that someone else could probably come up with an unoffical one).
If a converstion tool is made to transfer Dashboard Widgets to Konfabulator Widgets, you may soon see people moving over to Konfabulator. Will the original third party product find itself overbearing the one in your system you can't remove (for Mac users)? Then again, Dashboard widgets run as separate processes (each one) so an empty dashboard prolly uses little if any system resources. It's also a possibility someone will write a converstion tool to move Konfabulator Widgets back to Dashboard.
It will be interesting to see how much malicious widgets become a problem on the Windows side once Konfabulator becomes free and adopted more widely.
Writing and capitalizing is also hard. Apparently.
What's so HDTV capable about 1024x768?
An apologist is someone who engages in "apologetics".
From wikipedia: "Apologetics is the field of study concerned with the systematic defense of a position."
Dashboard is obviously the OSX widget thing.
So from this we can come to understand that a "dashboard apologist", while maybe a bit sketchy on the usage, is one who makes a systematic defense of the position that Dashboard isn't a ripoff of Konfabulator. This is in line with modern usage of the word "apologist", but you already knew that.
Maybe not, but some other product filling the same need, likely in a similar way, would have. Likewise, people wouldn't call foul if someone other than Apple had released Dashboard. People love a David-and-Goliath story, even after David gets bought by Yahoo.
And this might be a decent analogy if we were talking about portable digital audio players, but Apple is hardly a "Goliath" in the desktop market, or even the useless desktop widget market. For the former Microsoft is the only "Goliath" and the latter I'm not sure there's even enough of a market to have a dominant player, though if there is Apple has certainly not been at it long enough to default to the position.
Who really cares though? This is just another useless flamebait thread on Slashdot. I'm still not sure what real use there is for these things other than milking all those unused clock cycles.
The Farewell Tour II
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
killall Dock
Any widget you hold with the mouse while switching from dashboard to desktop will end up as a normal window.
And vice versa.
k2r
Or install the devMove widget.
I found the link for those of you who are interested in downloading it before it comes available from yahoo. mac version http://a191.g.akamai.net/7/191/1560/1/widgetgaller y.com/downloads/Konfabulator2.dmg
windows version
http://a191.g.akamai.net/7/191/1560/3/widget.tempo rary.com/downloads/Konfabulator2.zip
What confabulates me is that this isn't a KDE app.
[To grammar nazi's, yes I know that's not the meaning of confabulate. To Brits, yes I know you have a different sense of "humour".]
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
YEs the big get bigger !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
"'There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac,' said Schneider."
Which is kind of funny to me, since Konfabulator seemed to be making a slow move from the Mac to Windows since Dashboard was so similar. Still, Konfabulator is a nice piece of software (although its name makes it sound like it should be part of KDE), and free is always nice. Let's hope that Yahoo is good about maintaining it.
Yahoo! wants to be cross platform???!
6 /yahoo-music-unlimited
Oh, when that happens pigs will fly. They notoriously are not only single platform but actually do really stupid things.
Their music service, launched oh... in the last few months!!! tells Macintosh users that they must use Netscape 4.7 in order to use Yahoo! Music Limited!
Check this out:
http://rino.bowdoin.edu/wordpress/archives/2005/0
in the pre-OSX days, arlo was known by millions of macintosh
users for making 'Kaleidoscope' - it basically let users of
above-average graphic skill to theme the entire mac OS
interface down to the pixel without a lot of programming
knowledge. this was way ahead of anything that was done
in windows or linux. millions of mac users had custom UIs
because of this man.
but such a theme manager was closely tied with OS9,
and so when time came time for OSX, arlo started an even
more clever hack -- konfabulator.
now this was already very close to what apple always had with
desk accessories, but it was javascriptable (whereas DAs required
a separate development environment to compile); they were
internet enabled (desk accessories only lived in the time before
the internet); and they also had a really nice photoshop-able
front end (DAs couldn't utilize quickdraw as nicely as OSX's
incredible quartz graphics); and because CPUs were finally
fast enough, you could run them interpreted instead of
compiled.
these factors made konfabulator really nifty for quick, beautiful,
useful little utilities. but they fell too closely to apple's own revival
of the desk accessory concept, and so it looked like all of arlo's
hard work had all the chance of a netscape against a bundled browser.
so now yahoo buys them up, they all still got jobs, and it opens up
possiblities for them better than they ever had before -- this is a
good fate for these amazing mac developers. they have long been
a credit to the mac community. its great to see that they've come
across good fortune at this time. congratulations arlo & team!!
we love ya!
j.
I'll leave the debate over Konfabulator vs. Dashboard to the other kids... here's what I'm upset about...
"The acquisition of Konfabulator may not be the last Mac compatible product users see from Yahoo! While Schneider wasn't specific, he did say that there was interest in the Mac. 'There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac,' said Schneider. 'We want to make sure we find a way to be more cross platform.'"
OK, great. So start by making it possible to browse everything on Yahoo from a Mac! It's really annoying getting a message that my browser (nay, platform) isn't supported by a website. It's not like I'm using an obscure operating system like OS/2 or something.
Furthermore, I'm a cross-platform guy. I grew up using Macs & PCs, though I definitely prefer OSX. Recently, I've found a new love for my old Dell Latitude simply because of the awesomeness that is Yahoo Music Unlimited. What sucks is that I can't use it on my iBook.
For those who don't know, for less than the cost of a case of beer every month, Y! Unlimited is, essentially, a music on-demand system with DRM that's easy to live with. Personally, it's not very important that I "own the music." What's important to me is that I've discovered new music in a way I've missed since the original Napster was destroyed. Only LAUNCHcast and Y! Unlimited is WAY better than everything out there that's currently like it (I'm looking at you remixed Napster and Rhapsody.)
Sure, the download catalog isn't as deep as iTunes Music Store... but I'm sure the gap will eventually shrink. Yahoo is a large company with enough resources to make that happen.
LAUNCHcast, Yahoo's "radio" service, lets me rate music then taylors future songs to my preferences and tastes. It basically serves songs up on the fly without ads. It's really fucking slick.
At any rate, I wish they'd offer Y! Unlimited (or more to the point, Yahoo Music Engine) for OS X, but since it uses WM9 and whatever portable management system requires WinXP, I'm guessing that a port to Macs will probably never materialize. Which is too bad. I'd love to be able to use YME with Airfoil so I could stream it to my Airport Express... without Virtual PC.
A guy can dream...
I haven't examined both from the coding standpoint (I can't imagine they'd be *that* different there), but Konfabulator's display options put it at least a *few notched above Apple's Dashboard. I find the "floating" option especially useful, with the widget showing up on to of every program *BUT* without actually interfering with the programs below , i.e. if you (right-)click on the widget, you are actually (right-)clicking on the window below. K's new "Konspose'" layer mimics Apple's Expose layer (the *only* place you can see Apple widgets), and you can decide where to display widgets on a widget-by-widget basis. Konfabulator is *definitely* a better implementation, at least from a usability and flexibility standpoint...
(This text refers to the Windows edition.)
My contempt for the behavior and beliefs of the two major political parties cannot be adequately expressed in 120 chara
My GNOME weather applet not only tells me the weather (neatly, what to wear today before i open), but also verifies my net connection is up (else the weather is giant question mark), thus I know whether it's worth launching my browser to check all those other sites.
I am on a 1024*768 LCD, but I have room for a 128*128 Firefox icon on my desktop, which helps me (you can't really miss) and anyone else using my computer.
How about a decent Yahoo Messenger or letting launch.yahoo.com video works on a mac?
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Either way, I think that clutter is only a secondary problem. The primary problem, imo, is running a browser/interpreter in the background all the time. This stuff is for "teen chat queens" (AOL commercial reference), but not for gamers.
But, you know, this all boils down to being a direct move against Google in the API space. They're just countering Google's API popularity for Google Maps and other AJAX goodies. So, Yahoo just went out bought a JS company. Yeah, take that Google, Yahoo now has javascript API's too! Uhh.... let me guess, next, the companies will battle over if memory serves me correctly.
I8-D
I don't run OSX or Windows, is this Konfabulator like Superkaramba for KDE where you can have little Python applets on the desktop?
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Desk Ornaments
Maybe muslims wear a towelhead coz their brains are too big...and maybe jews wear those puny little small caps coz their brains are too small ? jews don't blow themselves up...directly...but they do everything to make sure they piss everybody else off so that they blow them off. Pissed Hitler and the germans, didn't you ? Look what you got, half of you small cap wearing thugs got bombed. Now you pissed off the muslims and keep bombing and occupying them. Guess what, some of 'em are pissed and are blowing you up. And they are a billion, while you jews are one of the smallest gangs on the planet, just a few million. Yet you cause so much trouble. And you cry 'anti-semitism' ? You get what you deserve, and you dragged us americans into this bullshit as well.
Or use Amnesty to get mutliple window levels (not just floating) for Dashboard widgets, plus settable opacity, auto-updating, virtual dashboard spaces, etc.
Bonus: runs on Panther too.
All those existed before both Konfabulator and Dashboard...
Yes, it's true kids!! Apple is copying Linux this time!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
It's so nice how you guys are ripping this small company, and praising Dashboard, without mentioning once how Apple completely ripped their idea without a single credit.
P.S. Please don't stop unrelatedly bashing MS due to my comment.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
I get all this current information the second I hit F12, it takes me a few seconds to scan it, then I hit F12 again and im back to working again.
You're trying to tell me your tabs are doing all this? You dont have to load them up every time you boot into the OS? I'm sorry, but the entire idea, again, is all this personalized info at a touch of a button, that appears and disappears as quick as you want. Always updates, all the time.
Intel + Apple + Yahoo = very interesting Mr. Bond. Me thinks Microsoft once again is in someone sights. More to come I'm sure.....
... to explain what konfabulator IS, in the story so people know at a glance instead of having to RTFA.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I find it difficult to look at Konfabulator's widgets and look at Apple's widgets and believe that Konfabulator doesn't have something big to do with Dashboard.
I'm agreeing with you, but you gotta remember that konfabulator widgets kinda look like OSX... and of course apple's gonna use their own [liquid plastic] look for their own product.
If Windows had done Dashboard, Mac users worldwide wouldn't be able to shut up about how Windows ripped off poor Konfabulator.
actually, I remember when dashboard was first demo'd. Konfabulator users everywhere were going nuts about how apple ripped off konfabulator.
personally, I like konfabulator's implementation better, and widgets also seem to have a little more control over the system, from looking at the widgets.
I played with konfabulator when it first came out, and followed the hype before it was actually shown off (it was quite the mystery product before it was officially announced), but the price was way too high for me to justify buying, especially since I didn't really have a true use for it.
I don't even really use dashboard except for the fact that I can hit F12 and have access to a calculator; that's the only widget I keep open.
if I used konfabulator, the only widget I'd use would be a UPS and/or FedEx package tracker. It'd be nice to see when packages arrive in real-time.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
For those asking the obligatory question: "But does it run on Linux?", the answer is "No, but..".
Linux (and BSD) have gDeskLets which provides the exactly the same/similar functionality with arguably more applications available for it.
It is these two exact projects which spurned the creation of Apple's "Dashboard" product available in Tiger.
I doubt Microsoft will license WM9 without the kind of OS support for strong DRM that's in NT kernel. That's easy to do in embedded devices, but it's not likely to happen on Mac OS X with its open-source kernel.
... it's no stranger than some of the ones that have been tossed around in /.]
[insert conspiracy theory about Microsoft being responsible for getting Apple to switch to Intel to support WM9 DRM
The idea that people must die off before perspectives change must be true! No, I'm giong to point to the /. discussion... which is of course based upon the DF post. (Because people shouldn't be allowed to endlessly discuss biased opinions without evidence.)
/. post discusses the origins of Widgets. What is new is using JavaScript and network technologies.
This old
No, the editors (and I do use the word loosely) are supposed to post "shit summaries like this one" two or three times and then light their cigars with a $100 bill, relaxing after a hard day's work well done.
That is all.
Um, I wasn't joking. I don't know when Konfabulator was first introduced but it seems very much like Active Desktop. I was indirectly asking if there's a chance MS had it first and didn't notice.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Gee, that's a swell idea. Yahoo! is working hard to make the Web more "cross platform" than it was before. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's out now! Download it people!
Not to be a naysayer, but am I the only one who doesn't quite see the purpose of widgets?
These are essentially small applications running within a hidden desktop, each additional widget takes up additional resources, and so many of these widgets are redundant. A widget to control your system volume? Isn't that what the volume menu item is for?
Does anybody really need to check traffic so often that it is necessary to have an application running continuously?
I gave widgets the benefit of the doubt when they came out, but found that the actual Widget system in Tiger significantly slowed down our systems and that it was actually more accessible to simply keep my address book or calculator open but minimized rather than having to use key combinations to make a terribly scaled down version of each of those apps (you can't copy and paste from widgets to other applications).
Who knows though, maybe I'm just an old geezer who really doesn't understand the purpose or the actual usefulness of widgets like "Mosquito... A little Widget that displays the mosquito conditions within your zip code for today and tomorrow. " or "Nascar: RSS feed of Nascar news, choose from several feeds including Nextel Cup, Busch Series and Truck Series. Feed time interval settings available also."
Sigh.
I just tried using the JTrack item, and I get an error message: Internet Explorer doesn't support synchronizing this type of URL.
Yeah, right. When was the last time they upgraded Yahoo Instant Messenger? Look at the difference between the mac and windows clients. They obviously have a Mac team of about zero people.
Currently hooked on AMP
The! real! new! name! for! this! product! is...
Konfabulator!
HBH
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
Actually, there have been a few sites out there that have covered the story of the original Macintosh, where they developed a way that users could have "desktop accessories", like a calculator, clock, etc... Dashboard brings this back. The only thing that Apple would have taken from Konfabulator is the fact that people actually cared about these things. .... or Steve Jobs tried to make it seem like people do.
The thing that I don't like about Dashboard is that you can't easily put the widgets anywhere you want, and even with the hack, they remain on top of all other windows, which isn't cool.
Let's take a closer look at this. Yahoo! started as a portal and search engine. Remember the search engine wars? Then Google came along. Back then it was just another search engine (that kinda rocked). However, while we saw search engines come and go (shall we list all the search engines that came to be...and how most of them are gone?) Google didn't sit on it's laurels. They found a profitable way to make money from its searches. Not content with that, they went into other services (maps, blogs, Picasa, toolbars, etc) so people will think of Google for more than searches (sort of like their own "halo effect"...Google is always on their mind). More success for Google. More obscurity for Yahoo. Yahoo, once the Internet's poster child, is not pleased with this and certainly doesn't want to go the way of the other dotcoms, figures adding a whole slew of new features (toolbar, Konfabulator, etc) and mimicking Google is a good way to go. Thus, a new era of "wars" is born.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
A quick check of http://widgets.yahoo.com/> shows that they've already got a batch of Yahoo! Branded Widgets planned, although they aren't available at the moment. The 'Widget Gallery' link just takes you to the existing Konfabulator Gallery.
Yahoo would do something about the ENTIRE mac auction section being 100% fraudulent auctions.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Funny- I just sent yahoo an email about my displeasure that some of their services were Windows only (I was tweaked specifically by not being able to use Yahoo! Avatar). Imagine my surprise to discover today that perhaps their response that they were working on it was not just lip service. Is this squeaky wheel really gonna get the oil? Here's hoping fewer companies treat non-Windows platforms as second-class citizens...
sigs are for fools and trolls. no signature is *always* appropriate. you should turn them off in your preferences.
I can't wait for the mandatory Yahoo Advertisement Widget.
This is a brilliant strategy. You see Microsoft doing their thing, you see Google doing their thing. MS has whatever they have (Active X) and Google doing Ajax...and Apple doing Dashboard widgets.
Want to merge the two and bring cool tools to your service? But Konfabulator. You give jobs to the development team and get all the Konfabulator Krazies developing new tools for your service. You can be as beta as you want, just build tools for us. We can call the whole thing YahooOS.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
And this might be a decent analogy if we were talking about portable digital audio players, but Apple is hardly a "Goliath" in the desktop market, or even the useless desktop widget market.
Or maybe, if, you know, Apple had ~10,000 employees vs. ~5 and effectively owns the ground that Konfabulator walks on.
You must've reached far into the depths of your own lack of understanding to want to bring up "the desktop market" and Microsoft in a story that has absolutely nothing to do with either.
Who really cares though?
Obviously you do. Why would you even enter into a thread that you don't know anything about, don't understand, and claim to not care about? Does "trying to build a high quality foes list" really require you to such pointless crap?
Go ahead, foe away. And once you're done purifying your environment so you never have to be exposed to ideas that you don't agree with, maybe then you can learn how to post a meaningful comment.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
from the announcement
So, we're excited. You should be too. We're in good hands at Yahoo!,
I mean, they acquired Flickr, right? How bad can they be?
Google - "Don't Be Evil."
Yahoo! - "How Bad Can We Be?"
Seriously, Konfabulator or DesktopX or Kapsules or Active Desktop or let's see if I can think of any more... Anyway, all of these I am certain have an audience. You have the skinning scene, the graphic artists, and basically Joe and Jane User who just like a "pretty" computer.
I think this was a very smart strategy for yahoo to buy this company. Look for Google to counter with a purchase real soon.