July 25th, 2005
Yahoo builds its desktop with widgets
I am a fan of widgets–simple, small, pleasantly graphical desktop applications that do everything from control the sound on your system and display time around the world to feed headlines and give the weather. Konfabulator started out doing cool widgets for the Mac (it also does Windows now), and then Apple decided it was a good idea and did itself for the Tiger release of the Mac OS. Konfabulator’s founders cried foul, and complained that Apple should have at least worked with them or bought them out. Now, Konfabulator has its revenge. Yahoo’s acquistion today of Konfabulator will put its Javascript widget engine in front of hundreds of millions of Yahoo users and entice thousands of developers to create widgets for the Yahoo platform.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
