Yahooulator!
Frankly, I didn’t see this one coming. When I wrote my small-tools manifesto, I really and truly and stupidly thought the network computing revolution was going to be rooted in a Linux-like geneology, borne of the swarm-ware philosophies of K&R, the natural progression out from a network operating system.
Wrong-o, dude.
What’s worse wound salt for my pompous punditry is not just that I was prognostically wrong, but that I was as wrong as I could be; while I was off lamenting the drift from small-tools thinking and suffocating under ever more monolithic Linux desktop bloat, the MAC-heads were rolling in it. Who-da thunk it?
“… when we first thought of Konfabulator, one of the key pieces was accessing internet content. Well guess what Yahoo has boat-loads of? Yup. And what’s really great is that they’re starting to open it up to everyone in a format that’s useable outside the traditional browser, as XML feeds. Guess how they’re going to provide real-world examples of how to use this stuff …”
[ Yahoo!, here we come! ]
Ok, admittedly, it’s not total-complete network computing, and when they say ‘cross platform‘ they have their heads up their proprietary sands. But dig, it’s still headed in a healthy direction, and from what I can tell from their story, and not being able to actually try it, Konfabulator on Yahoo! seems a heck of alot closer to the recombinant anything anywhere mark than any Nautilus or Yum.
