OS X Code (r,s)

Posted on Tuesday 13 December 2005 - Popularity: 7%

Five months ago, Yahoo! acquired the popular Mac and Windows software Konfabulator. Yesterday they’ve released version 3 and renamed the application to Yahoo! Widget Engine. Question: “What happens in many cases when a big company buys a small innovative company?” Often such software doesn’t really get better anymore. Next question: “What happens with such software if it’s released for free?” They try to bundle it with other software and/or add extra advertisement (banners …). A few examples from an Ars Technica “review” (they tested the PC version, but the OS X version is no different):

The biggest complaint about this little widget monster has been its appetite for RAM, so I was interested to see if Yahoo had worked any magic on the application. Surely they’d want to make it more system friendly in order to spur adoption.

With four widgets running under 2.01, I have 42MB in use, but with 3.0 that jumps up to 53MB, an increase of 11MB. This is the opposite of what should have happened, and it certainly won’t help YWE’s reputation amongst PC enthusiasts.

Now I have enough RAM, so that doesn’t bother me that much, but it gets worse:

The default install not only attempts to set your default search engine and web page to Yahoo’s offerings (which is par for the course), but the application also wants to install Yahoo! Central, which monitors those settings and tries to keep them in place. A minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. More irritating, some of my third-party apps now “steal focus” when they update. For example, my RSS reader pulls itself to the foreground whenever it updates, and there’s no reason for it to do so.

I get the feeling that YWE has been released before it is ready, and it is somewhat disheartening to see that Yahoo’s self-promotional interests have been addressed twofold, while other things languish. The company will have to take some major leaps forward in the near future, however.

Now of course the question is, should you wait with an update? My opinion? Yes, you should, not only haven’t there be many interesting widget releases lately, with all the new bugs the best thing you can do is wait a few months and hope everything gets fixed and that the old spirit under widget developers returns … not that I expect that to happen, but you never know.

Fredi

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