I love free things. As far as I’m concerned, if I can have something for free, and its good, then I’m happy. I first stumbled across Konfabulator some time ago. I think it was around the time Apple announced that OS 10.4 Tiger was going to have these new ‘Widget’ things, then a bit of a storm started that they had stolen the idea from somebody else.
At the time, you had to pay for Konfabulator. If I recall, it was about $40 or so. The idea is simple – you have a set of little applets called ‘Widgets’ that sit on your desktop in various places and do simple tasks. For example, I currently have a clock, calendar, word of the day and a weather report on my desktop.
Recently, the nice folks at Yahoo decided to buy the Konfabulator product and make it free. Its quite obvious why they did it. Google continue to dominate the world of information and sharing it – Yahoo were starting to look a bit silly by comparison. Yahoo are looking to open up the Konfabulator API and their own systems to enable people to write widgets capable of pulling all sorts of useful information onto your desktop in real time. Its an exciting prospect. People love information; like I say, I have my weather widget, plus I have the BBC’s news alerts on my PC for up-to-the-minute reports. We’re all information junkies, and the more info we get, the better.
Konfabulator is a simple, elegant solution that allows this information to seemlessly integrate with the desktop. Its a bit like Microsoft’s somwhat failed attempt at the Active Desktop, only more likely to work. I certainly look forward to where this one goes!