Yahoo to acquire Konfabulator

Filed under: Fun, Utilities, News, Windows, Macintosh, Apple, Yahoo!, Freeware

Yahoo to acquire Konfabulator

by Marc Perton Jul 25th 2005

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.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

wormeyman said 4:19AM on 7-25-2005

That's awesome! Konfabulator uses alot of memory on my system though :(

Mgs0008b221 said 4:23AM on 7-25-2005

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

ds_fan said 4:30AM on 7-25-2005

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?

jhno said 1:33PM on 7-25-2005

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~ said 3:28PM on 7-25-2005

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.

eleongonzales said 9:45AM on 7-26-2005

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?

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