Reaping the Whirlwind

The big news in "the industry" is that Yahoo, in a pretty unexpected move, bought out a company called Pixoria, responsible for a highly controversial Mac/Windows program called Konfabulator. To make a long story short, Konfabulator was a program that wasn't just any program: it was actually a program that allowed you to run litttle mini-programs called "widgets". These were little applications that you could easily have on your desktop to use at your beck-and-call, from monitors measuring wi-fi signal strength to news readers that could stream today's headlines right to your desktop. When Apple released Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the big announcement was an interesting feature called Dashboard, which allowed you to...well, run litttle mini-programs called "widgets" that you could easily have on your desktop to use at your beck-and-call, from monitors measuring wi-fi signal strength to news readers that could stream today's headlines right to your desktop.

Pundits cried bloody murder, that Apple trampled all over a poor developer by stealing his ideas - a concept that in my opinion, has been to a good extent addressed and even refuted by John Gruber, for reasons which are too arcane for me to get into.

Which brings us here to the Yahoo buyout. It seems that everyone wins: the developers, who get full backing from Yahoo, Mac and Windows end-users, who now get all of Konfabulator for FREE (the previous price was USD $25), and widget developers, who hopefully now will benefit from Yahoo's apparent willingness to open up widget development to more users, making it more accessible.

Having used it for two days under varying conditions (i.e. my desktop jammed full of widgets to only a bare minimum of those I need actually being active), I have to say that I sadly still have the same problems with Konfabulator that I did way back in 2003 when I first tried the early beta and 1.x releases of Konfabulator (the current version is 2.1):

1. Resource Usage. Konfabulator is a notorious CPU and memory hog, taking up system memory and processor cycles with considerable enthusiasm. Even when running by itself, with no widgets loaded, it can take up a very significant amount of memory. It's disappointing that nothing seems to have been done to deal with this problem, though it seems that it has improved from the early 1.x releases.

2. Third-Party Widgets. One of the problems with the new freeware release under Yahoo is that it's been now given a new version: 2.1. They must have done something to the program besides take out the registration stuff asking for a paid serial number because it seems to have broken a lot of widgets; ones that worked just fine in earlier versions, now don't. That isn't a fault of the developers, but it is a major problem.

Second is the fact, that well, I hate to say it, but there aren't really any "killer widgets" that make this tool indispensable. RSS reader? I've got NetNewsWire Light. Internet search from the desktop? I've got not only Huevos, but the internet search function in Another Launcher. And so on and so on. This isn't an insult to the people who've gone to the effort of making their own widgets...I actually have a lot of respect for them for what they've done, since making Konfabulator widgets is much more difficult compared to making widgets for Dashboard (another significant problem with Konfabulator). Just that I've yet to find the one widget with that certain something, that certain je ne sais quoi that makes both it and Konfabulator a must-have app.

But hey, that doesn't detract from the fact that Konfabulator is still an incredible app from people with an incredible history of user-interface development on the Mac. And you certainly can't argue with the price. And what's more, Windows users get to join in on the fun too.

If you've got a few minutes to spare, I think it's worth heading on over to the Konfabulator website to download it and try it out; it'll run on just about anything able to run XP and 10.2+. What have you got to lose? It's totally free, and chances are you might end up gaining some use out of it.