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

Cheap buy?

[Chmarr]

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 :)

Re:too lazy to google right now

[uprock_x]

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

Re:Good press begins with the Mac

[jesterzog]

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.

They're definitely providing at least a couple of services which I'm surprised that Google isn't heavily involved in just yet.

One of them is YahooGroups, for running mailing lists (along with several additional group-like features latched on). I guess Yahoo picked up a lot of this market by default, especially after Listbot was shut down by Microsoft. The other is Yahoo Calendar, which I'm admittedly only just starting to play with, but I'm finding it useful.

The biggest reason that I'm surprised Google hasn't touched these areas is that they're both very search-oriented, or can be. Just about everything Google's done in the past has been based around some kind of searching, or generally helping people to find things. That's where Google's expertise is.

Re:Clutter

[coldmist]

I've played around with it a bit. I have it on my laptop. The widgets are showing battery (much, much nicer than the stupid default windows one), wifi stength, disk usage, and weather.

Of these, only the weather one "could" be shown through a browser.

I have mine set to only be seen as part of the background, so none of the widgets are on top of any windows. But they are visible if all windows are minimized

My only complaint is the memory footprint (20MB just for the engine, plus 1-5MB per widget), and some widgets are CPU hogs, causing my battery to drain faster than usual (one of the battery monitors!) and cpu to stay hotter.