Aye; you’re right, it is just another widget engine. However:

1. Yahoo! Widgets also live in a layer above the normal desktop, exactly like Dashboard widgets. Except they also have the capability to act as windows, if the user so wishes. The default behaviour for newly-installed widgets is to behave like application windows, but a change is only three clicks away. So, in actual fact, Konfab widgets can work in the same way as Dashboard ones (albeit, somewhat annoyingly, on a *seperate*) “Dashboard” called the “Heads Up Display”, but they can *also*, on user request, work as the application window types you suggest.

2. Yes, Konfabulator widgets are also XML/Javascript. There have been proposed XSLTs to perform translations, but I (a) don’t have a Mac to try them out on and (b) don’t care – I wrote the tool as an excuse to play with a new development language, not to genuinely produce something useful (that was just a side-effect). The “compilation” of a Konfab widget is simply packaging it into a ZIP file, and this isn’t strictly necessary; just convenient. As a result, all Konfab widgets are open source by their nature.