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Yahoo to acquire Konfabulator
Word is that Yahoo is poised to announce that they've reached an agreement to acquire Konfabulator, and will confirm the deal on Monday. If you're not familiar with Konfabulator, it's the original version of Apple's Dashboard; a Javascript runtime environment that lets anyone create standalone mini-applications (aka "Widgets"). Unlike Apple's Widgets, it's also cross-platform, and Yahoo has said they plan to extend the program's current Mac and Windows versions to Linux, and possibly to handheld platforms as well. Yahoo plans to offer Konfabulator for free, which may not be a welcome announcement to anyone who recently paid $19.99 for it, but should guarantee wider distribution for the program. Konfabulator creator Arlo Rose will apparently stay on, as Yahoo's Director of Widget Technology.
Update: The deal is official, and there's good news for paying customers. Anyone who has paid for Konfabulator 2.0 is eligibile for a full refund. Not too shabby.
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsMgs0008b221Jul 25th 2005 4:23AM
No, no, this can't be happening. Konfab is grea thow it is, actually a good Avedesk comptetitor, but this doesn't look good.
While companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo try to beat each other out it ends up worse for us. tsk tsk tsk
wormeymanJul 25th 2005 4:19AM
That's awesome! Konfabulator uses alot of memory on my system though :(
ds_fanJul 25th 2005 4:30AM
In the end it may be thanks to Apple for hyping dashboard, alls well that ends well? Some question marks tho - malicious scripts? spyware widgets?
jhnoJul 25th 2005 1:33PM
Konfabulator is cool and all, but it is a resource HOG. (Maybe 2.0 is better.) A lot of the biching about Apple's "stealing" the idea from them went away when it became clear that Apple's implementation was much better: more flexible, more powerful, and less resource-hungry. (And companies buy companies for technologies, not for ideas.)
Nevertheless, especially with Konfab's being cross-platform, this is a big deal for us fans of widgets. Though it would be nice if their were a nice Dashboard-Konfab conversion kit.
~J~Jul 25th 2005 3:28PM
Y'know, despite it looking lurvley, I just don't like this app at all. Yes it's got some nice features, but it just never felt right to me, as if it was half finished.
eleongonzalesJul 26th 2005 9:45AM
I have been debating on purchasing konfabulator for XP ever since I developed my addiction for widgets in OSX. I'm glad it's now free to the masses but I worry about the implications it has for apple and the yet to be releases 10.4M$-vista-cat. Apple's big ticket features of the 10.4 upgrade are dashboard and spotlight, granted there are more but they really pushed these two. Now, with a dashboard equivalent application and Google desktop search (or others) it seems that the new version of OSX lacks luster. I'm not sure what affect this will have overall but I can't see it being a good thing. Either way- konfabulator is going on both my xp and linux partitions.
It's funny, with flyakiteosx, taskswitcher xp, konfabulator, aqua dock, yzshadow, and winroll my xp is becoming more and more OSX everyday... keep them coming guys. Oh and one more thing- anyone try the expose equivalents for XP yet?