How Much Would You Expect To Pay?

Looks like yet another excellent piece of software has been set free by the Big Boys. And it’s all good news.
I’ve been looking at ‘Konfabulator‘ for some time, because it’s such a cool way of putting your computer to work in a multitude of small ways, rather than in one big way (like Windows or Office). You download whatever widget you need, for activities like checking the weather, or keeping an eye on some hidden part of your computer, and it does the job. Simply, elegantly, and in new ways you hadn’t thought of before. Also, it’s able to work with both windows AND mac computers, so everyone wins.
Having been a commercial product for a couple of years, today, it’s been bought by Yahoo, and is now free. Free, I tells ya. Woo hoo!
It’s the latest in a long line of products which the big internet companies have acquired with their own money, and have offered to you and I for free, as a way of driving people to their way of thinking about the internet. Yahoo did it with Flickr. Google bought Picasa and Keyhole. Microsoft occasionally offer tools and programmes for free as tests of things they’re planning for new versions of Windows.
So, it’s no longer the case that in order to work with a computer ‘on the cheap’, you needed to put up with tricky tech tricks and freeware. These are really useful, commercial-grade products which you can get for free.
I highly recommend Konfabulator.