Yahoo! Acquires Konfabulator

[7/25/2005] Congratulations to Arlo, Ed and Perry! I played around with Konfabulator back in the 1.0 days. It was obvious, even back then, that it was just bursting at the seams with potential. My only problem: it wasn't designed for me. I just couldn't make a nice looking widget to save my life. I think, at its heart, it is a tool that's designed to give graphic artists the ability to write widget applications with a some programmatic stretching. Its sort of the inverse of say, Cocoa, which lets programmers write applications that look halfway decent with just a little graphic stretching. Cocoa just fit me better. But if you're graphically inclined, Konfabulator is more than worth a spin.

[Update: 8/22/2005] In an interview with John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, John makes an interesting comment about Dashboard (Apple's Konfabulator). I'll quote the second of two points that he felt was controversial about Dashboard:

The fact that widgets need to be created with the help of a graphic designer or Photoshop artist. An utterly unartistic programmer can design beautiful regular Mac software using the standard OS controls; a Dashboard widget that isn’t custom-designed by a good artist is going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Exactly right.