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 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
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.
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.
Well it was there all this time and code is so mature that there are Tiger owners buying it.
If I liked things like Dashboard, I'd go for Konfabulator too.
They went win32 in weeks after Apple included same functionality with the OS.
Also don't forget one thing. We, geeks use latest and greatest OS when it ships but many people currently run 10.3 and even 10.2.8. It can run on them.
Well I call this "Happy ending". I don't have spesific "hate" against Apple as zealots assume, I am an Apple user myself. Just I think they should make them a favor, not money or something, credit or a name mention.
Just seek how EA (electronic arts) was founded, you will be surprised.
This is happy ending I think. Everyone is happy including licensed customers of Konf.
ps: For people jumping and saying "They didn't invent it!' etc, I was running Active Desktop at IE 4 times on win32
Come on now, who can resist a product named.
Konfabulatorahoo!
This makes me happy, since I have been very unhappy with apples implementation. Many widgets such as iTunes widgets and weather widgets are pretty worthless when they don't say up all the time. Why bring up Dashboard to then get the itunes widget to click "next" when you could just click on itunes. Konfabulator had is right with widgets being able to stay on the desktop all the time.
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!!
How are you supposed to figure out if you want to RTFA or not if the summary doesn't contain a description of what the hell it is TFA is talking about. The "editors" are supposed to reject shit summaries like this one.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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
...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.
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.
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)
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 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.
The only way Dashboard is "better" is that all the widgets run in one process, instead of forking a process for each widget like Konfabulator does. It's probably an order of magnitude better in terms of performance.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Windows has always had the ability to add scriptable components to the desktop. I believe there was a great hue and cry about how evil and unstable this all was, and about how desktops weren't supposed to be playgrounds or HTML renderers and blah blah blah.
You can still add such components, and script them in any language that implements the WSH interface.
But of course Konfabulator widgets all run in a security sandbox and could never do anything malicious. Right?
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot