Konfabulator is a late comer to the whole widget business anyway. DesktopX (www.desktopx.net) was doing everything Konfabualtor could do and more years before Konfabulator showed up.

Last week they released DesktopX 3.1 which, amongst other things, includes a Professional version that lets people export their widgets as gadgets. Gadgets are truly stand alone. Your examples would be much better as gadgets since it wouldn’t require companies to bundle some 10 megabyte run time. DesktopX gadgets tend to be around 500k total. No other files needed.

And, after all that work of making links, I have a feeling they’re going to have nofollow tags. So, any search engines hitting this page might not fully understand that this comment is about OpenDoc and Taligent. And, it will help any scraper sites that want to rank above WP for those terms.

Would Yahoo! have been as interested in Konfab had Apple not shown the amazing across the board potential for widgets in its latest OS? Also, if what PXLated says above is true, the ease with which you can program for Apple widgets is a plus in their favor. It means that anyone with a great idea for a widget can bring it forward, upload it to Apple’s site and share it without having to bother with proprietary Konwhatevertheirnameis.

Apple may have had Desktop Accessories waaay back in early versions of their old OS, but they are nothing like the current widgets of Konfabulator. Apple fans who will defend ANYTHING the company does have tried to argue otherwise, but even if you put that debate aside, the Desktop Accessories disappeared long ago.

In Konfabulator, Arlo Rose and company had a great idea, married it with good coding and put it together in a gorgeous visual package, something which happens rarely. (Most developers only get it partly right.)

And Apple came along as swiped the entire thing.

Now Yahoo! is going to popularize an excellent program (for free!) and extend what was temporarily a competitive advantage for the new Tiger OS to everyone. It’s a brilliant move.

I love Apple, which is why I’m happy this sad tale had such a happy ending. That’ll teach ‘em.

It’s also worth pointing out that one of the K co-founders was apparently working at Sun at the time. Sun invented Java, but apparently that was considered too difficult or too slow, too heavyweight, or not xplatform enough.

Widgets and other components have been around for a long time from Apple, MS, and others.

I’d like to see an astronomy widget that would tell me from my current location where I can find major constellations and planets and what exciting conjunctions etc. are coming up in the sky for me to see.

Or how about a sophisticated insult widget which like a thesaurus would give you instant access to wonderfully obscure insults you could hurl at that urbane, obtuse, pseudo-intellectual, long-winded blogger who’s been aggravating you so much lately, and whom you’d like to call a variety of names none of which would be appropriate in a public forum.

Here’s an example:

“Jim continues to advance the older, well tested, but more conservative views of the Procrustean school, but concentrates on the Antediluvian approach rather than the more progressive disintegrative antipotentials viewpoint as advanced by Brobdingnag et al. Perhaps he is not familiar with Sheiskopf and his work on this subject? It is a testimonial to the broadmindedness of the authorities in his part of the world that he is able to voice these views without apparent inhibition. I wonder if he has adequately studied the valuable influence of intelligence on this issue.”

You seem like old buddies with Howard. “17 million this, 17 million that.”

“I’m not into this whole blog thing,” says Robin.

Good call, but I don’t think you’ve convince them about the blog business model.