Dashboard née Konfabulator?

This recent article at SEOChat.com about Konfabulator is fairly timely considering a conversation I recently had with a coworker.

Because I live under a rock,I only checked out Tiger for the first time recently. While I’ve been aware of this “thing” called Dashboard,I wasn’t aware of the striking similarity to a little app I’ve used in the past called Konfabulator. For those of you that live under a much larger rock than I do,Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets exist in a semi-transparent world on your desktop and present you useful information like the local weather,cpu usage, a stock ticker,etc. Anyhow,I remarked to a coworker how similar the two are and we assumed Apple had either purchased Konfabulator or at the very least licensed the technology. It was shortly thereafter that I stumbled upon the above article that enlightened me.

It seems Yahoo!,not Apple,recently bought Konfabulator to beef up their desktop search in response to competition from Google and Microsoft. Dashboard and Microsoft’s Sidebar rely on consumers having specific operating systems while Yahoo’s new Konfabulator obviously doesn’t. Google’s APIs is still in beta giving Yahoo a huge headstart in this department.

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