Attack of the Yahoo! Widgets
Be VERY glad you are not Bill Gates. Yeah, his garage holds 65 cars, he has a great wife Melinda (we’ll forgive her for Microsoft Bob), a very cute kid, and a house to die for. And to state the obvious, billg is a multi billionaire, arguably one of the most powerful people on earth.
Now the poor guy not only has to stress out about Vista (nee Longhorn), he will also lose sleep because Yahoo! has invaded Microsoft’s (in)-valuable screen real estate. Konfabulator, now part of the Yahoo empire, is a frontal assault on Microsoft desktop dominance. The future is web services, and Konfabulator provides VERY easy to develop desktop widget technology with a completely open API.
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What Is Konfabulator?
Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.
What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today’s advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X.
[tease]
“We are actually focusing really hard on making sure developers are first class citizens in our new home. With all this cool Konfabulator stuff comes Yahoo’s new XML APIs. Since we’re kick-starting Yahoo’s Developer Network, this means that our current Konfabulator community will become the founding members of Yahoo’s Developer community. Widgets like TV Scraper won’t need to scrape any more (there goes the name) and will get our full support during development. Awesome. Grassroots support from third party developers is one of the primary reasons why Yahoo is so excited about Konfabulator, and that Yahoo is 100% committed to keeping Konfabulator free and open for anyone to build Widgets (and to create a massive installed base for developers to distribute their Widgets to).”
Did I mention that on day one, Yahoo provided a Flickr api for Yahoo! Widgets, (nee Konfabulator)?