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.'"

Comments

Konfabulator ??

[Jeet81]

Took me some time to figure out what Konfabulator actually is.

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.

Re:I just bought Konfabulator

[FuzzzyLogik]

if you read the damn article you'd notice they were giving refunds to people who bought it in the past 2 months. reading is fundamental and i don't think half the fucking population can do it anymore.

Re:too lazy to google right now

[johnbeat]

>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

A Better News Article on Konfabulator Sale

[Sundroid]

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.

...to place widgets on desktop:

[k2r]

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.

Re:Incredibly annoying.

[Durf]

http://widgets.yahoo.com/

Enjoy.