Konfabulator free as in beer

[mmcirvin]

All of you Windows users who have been reading us Mac users gushing about Dashboard widgets are now in for a treat: Yahoo has bought Konfabulator (the third-party app that obviously inspired Dashboard, and is now ported to Windows) and will give away the runtime for free, presumably so they can promote their Yahoo-based widgets.

I'd say that Konfabulator will now crush Apple's Dashboard, but while the widgets are not cross-compatible, they are so easy to make that there's not much development overhead to support both. It hardly matters anyway since Konfabulator runs on the Mac too and Yahoo has no reason to withhold it. Really everybody wins.

Comments

[bluethree.livejournal.com]

... but is it free as in FREEDOM?

In other words, source code, GPL'ed, please.

(not expecting it, but it's worth asking)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Probably not, but the widgets all have human-readable source, which is why Apple's variant has spawned widgets in such immense profusion.

[sneakums.livejournal.com]

I wonder how hard it would be to write a Dashboard widget that can host Konfabulator widgets.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I wonder how hard it would be to write a Dashboard widget that can host Konfabulator widgets.

Not too hard, I would guess. I've only taken a quick look at the Konfabulator documents, but the XML I saw looks like it could mostly be parsed into HTML. It would probably be easier to re-write them into native Dashboard widgets, though.

From the very small amount of playing with Konfabulator I did yesterday, I'm not planning on switching from Dashboard. I much prefer the hidden widgets to cluttering up my desktop with them. Of course, I'm working on a 12" laptop; if I had some massive 36" monitor I might like Konfabulator better.