if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
Konsolidation
by Lee
Attention Windows widget folks: Yahoo has acquired Konfabulator, and it’s now a free download. I’m sure that Yahoo’s interest in providing a full range of fully internet-aware widget applications as nothing to do with Apple providing exactly this feature in the most recent version of OS X.
Comments
Oh, absolutely, Apple totally ripped the idea off from Konfabulator. But until Apple put desktop widgets into OS X Konfabulator was just another cool piece of shareware, but now it’s part of Yahoo. Once again it shows that Steve Jobs is way ahead of the curve on just about everyone. If Konfabulator was such an obviously essential utility, why didn’t Yahoo buy it a year ago? Because Jobs was the one who saw the potential. Look for MS to add their own version in Windows Vista.
Forgive my ignorance, but what is Konfabulator?
Go to the link, click on Download, and check it out. It’s the piece of software that inspired Dashboard in OSX.
Sorry, Lee, but I have a long-standing policy that if I’m going to acquire anything that sucks, I have to ejaculate as a result of it, and it had better make me breakfast, do the dishes, do the laundry, and clean my flat as well. Macs only qualify on the sucking part, with no prospect for ejaculation. No dice.
Why we blink without noticing.
Until you read that Link.
Sorry the devil mad me do it.
Windows has had widgets with ‘DesktopX’ from Stardock for years now, even before Konfab came out, so what we have here-once again-is Jobs taking other peoples ideas and doing them a little bit better, but lets not call it anything but appropriation, not innovation. I’ll admit dashboard is the best yet of all the widgets apps, but it was hardly visionary on Steve’s part to include it in Tiger after seeing it for years on mac and Windows. the same thing with garageband, great app and a load of user friendly, but its been half a decade since Acid defined the loop-based tool on Windows. God bless Apple and I lick my new Imac g5 every day, but Jobs aint no visionary saint, he’s as shrewd a thief and copycat as Gates ever was.
I’ve used Konfab before, and now that it’s free, I installed it again immediately. The coolest widgets are the internet-aware ones, so it’s not a real useful piece of software on a dial-up connection, but luckily I ditched that a couple months ago, so it’s found a spot on my machine for a long time now.
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Konfabulator PREDATES “the most recent version of OS X”, n’est-ce pas?
Apple does its share of co-opting too.