Yahoo has added another one of my favorite sites to their service – first Flickr, now they have announced the acquisition of Konfabulator. And best of all – it’s now FREE!

Konfabulator is a Windows/Mac tool to allow users to run small mini-apps (called Widgets). The company was created by former Apple employee Arlo Rose, and preceeded the Tiger Dashboard by several years. It remains my favorite over Dashboard – as it has a simply amazing catalog of user-created widgets, and best of all the apps remain on-screen at all times, easily accessible from a menubar icon or expose-like function key reveal feature.

Frankly, I keep one of my two office monitors cluttered with widgets. I’ve got several webcams on there, rotating through radar images, a local Atlanta TV station towercam (all via the WebImages widget). I have Hong Kong, San Fran, Denver, Atlanta and London wall clocks (WorldClockPro). I also have a minicalendar, a couple of spiffy uptime/cpu usage monitors, a weather warning widget, and a great widget called the iTunes Companion. If I play a song w/out album art, it fetches it and installs it in the MP3. Sweet!

I had paid for Konfabulator (it used to be a nag-ware product) for the Mac a couple of years back. When the PC version came out, I was bummed to discover that my existing SN wouldn’t work on the new version – I’d have to pony up cash for the PC independent of the Mac. This past weekend, I was actually considering a purchase for the PC – but Y! made that decision a bit simpler.

Anyway, it’s great news that Yahoo has seen this as a product to spread via their considerable market reach. The PR indicates that they saw value in using Konfabulator as a means to extend access to Yahoo’s APIs. Seems like another in a series of major portals buying a pay service and setting it free. Google’s Maps/Earth (Keyhole) and Picasa are just two examples…

Links:
Konfabulator’s letter to the community
Slashdot reports on the purchase
Om Malik breaks the news about Pixoria’s buyout
PaidContent.org on the new business model

Is it particularly chilly in hell today? At the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference in San Francisco this morning, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced a plan to completely migrate from Motorola PowerPC processors to Intel CPUs by 2007. MacWorld has a running commentary from the WWDC, and are holding up to the onsalught of traffic. Amazingly, he reports that for the past five years, every Mac OS build has been compiled to run on the Intel platform. For one, Jobs mentioned that Apple had to make this move to continue to improve the PowerBook line – the PowerPC just wasn’t going to cut it on power and heat issues. Here’s a key quote from Jobs:

“I stood up here two years ago and promised you 3.0 GHz. I think a lot of you would like a G5 in your PowerBook, and we haven’t been able to deliver that to you. But as we look ahead, and though we’ve got great products now, and great PowerPC products still to come, we can envision great products we want to build, and we can’t envision how to build them with the current PowerPC roadmap.”

First machines will ship with Intel inside (cough, marketing slogan, cough) by this time in 2006. I want to know how this implementation will prevent users from installing the Intel-compatible builds of OSX on generic Intel hardware. If not, this opens the Mac up in ways some thought would never happen. Good luck, Mr. Jobs, and I think congrats are in order.
Update: very good analysis from AppleMatters.com is here. All assumptions aren’t valid, but some are right on target.

Apple’s new OS, codename Tiger, ships this coming Friday. I’ve seen it in action here and there, and word is that it’s a tremendous improvement. It includes features for my Mom (ie – visually impaired assistance improvements). But this recap looks at 50 random features of the new OS any geek would love to know. Read on.

From today’s Democrat & Chronicle:

Apple Computer Inc. is to open its first Rochester-area store this summer at Eastview Mall. The Apple Store will take over the 3,600-square-foot space occupied by B. Dalton Books, which is closing, said Dennis Wilmot, vice president and regional director of leasing at Wilmorite Property Management, which operates the mall.

Now I can get my Mac fix in Amy’s hometown.