Laurent Duveau : Popfly

Microsoft TechEd 2008 pictures

pluginbaby — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:38:00 GMT

Some pictures from Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando:

(Some credit go to Rodrigo Diaz)
Mashup powered by Microsoft PopFly, check it out! www.popfly.com

Technorati Tags: teched 2008,popfly

Try Popfly!

pluginbaby — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:46:16 GMT

I recently came back to Popfly and noticed some nice changes :

Much cleaner user interface
Blocks organized by category
Tweaking feature
Dapper and Facebook integration

If you do not know what Popfly is about, Nik Cubrilovic from TechCrunch wrote a new review :

"With Popfly, you can create applications, mashups, web pages and widgets (gadgets) and it is all tied together in a social network (as part of the Live Spaces platform) where you can connect with other users and publishers of applications. Mashups are created by dragging in and connecting ‘blocks’ which produce an output. Blocks are modules that connect to various web services API’s, and even today there are dozens of different blocks that work with a whole variety of different web services."

Also read: Top 10 reasons "Why I Think Popfly is Cool ?" by John Montgomery (Popfly Program Manager):
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmont/archive/2007/05/18/why-i-think-popfly-is-cool.aspx

Meet the Popfly team in this Channel 9 webcast :
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=308460

Currently the project status is still private Alpha-test, I have 5 invitations so leave a comment if you want one of them!

Microsoft CodeNames

pluginbaby — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:59:50 GMT

Hey, just a quick link I found on Wikipedia :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames

Maybe you already heard about Atlas, Monad, Origami, Avalon, InfoCard or Kahuna... but did you know Springfield (Popfly) ? Sparkle (Blend) or Q (Windows Home Server) ?? Or maybe you don't care ;-) if not, you'll find the whole list of Microsoft Codenames there. While always on the cutting edge of technologies, working most of the time with codenames and beta products, this can be useful when a bit lost among all these names.

Using your mashups from Popfly

pluginbaby — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 03:30:09 GMT

For a tutorial on creating Popfly mashup, read my previous post :
Building a simple mashup step by step with Popfly.

So now that you have a mashup, what can you do wih it ?

Your mashup is private by default.

First thing to do is switching it to public by clicking on "Share" :

Now that the mashup is shared, you have several new options :

You can :

Embed it in a web page
Export as Gadget for Vista Sidebar
Add it to your Windows Live Space

Embed it

Click on "Embed it" to get the HTML code needed to embed your mashup in any web page.
Note the options to publish your mashup in a new entry of your blog (requires MetaBlog API), also TypePad, and probably more to come.

Download as Gadget

Click on "Download as Gadget" to install your mashup directly in your Vista's Sidebar, like any Gadget from the Live Gallery. A mashup is just HTML, Javascript and Silverlilght, so there are no problem to host it in Vista Sidebar, but users will have to install Silverlight.

For now (beta...) export is not perfect (specially for the size) but you can easily tweak it by going to your local folder :
%userprofile%\appdata\local\microsoft\windows sidebar\gadgets

Better now!

In fact the exported gadget is just an iframe with a link to your content in Popfly, for my sample :

If you point your browser to http://www.popfly.ms/users/pluginbaby/Blaugh Carousel.content you'll see that the entire content of the mashup is there, the exported gadget act like a wrapper for the Sidebar.

Add to Windows Live Space

I don't have a Live Space but I assume you just have to specify which account to publish and it will create a new entry with your mashup embeded.

Building a simple mashup step by step with Popfly

pluginbaby — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:38:00 GMT

If you don't know what is Popfly, please read my previous post for an introduction : Popfly: Let's have fun!

Here my goal is just to show you the few steps involved during the creation of a complete mashup with Popfly, for those of you who do not want to bother asking for an invitation nor watching a webcast, or maybe fed up with beta things?
Just look below and discover how to build a Blaugh carousel in 35 sec (4 steps)!!

One of the options in the home page at www.popfly.ms is to "Create a Mashup", and is kindly enough to remind us the definition of a mashup.

Building a mashup with Popfly is just a matter of using at last two existing blocks and link them together.

So here we go, click on "Create a mashup" !!

1. From the Blocks list on the left pane, drag and drop the Blaugh block on the work surface.
Note: the list is already impressive, an easy way to find a block is to begin typing letters in the search box and results appears live in an AJAX way.

The block appears with a 3d effect (Silverlight), and can be configured with the wrench icon (but we do not even need that now).

Click on the bulb icon to get a list of blocks which would work well with the current one.

2. Add a Carousel block.

3. Link both blocks together by clicking on the blue disc:

4. You are done!
Note that the work area's background displays a preview of your mashup :

Click on preview to test your mashup : the page shows a 3d carousel displaying last 20 Blaugh pictures!

Advanced steps ;-) click on the wrench to configure a block :

You can customize inputs (parameters) of each available operations (web service). By default, you see that my carousel's parameters has been filled with data output from the Blaugh's block : very smart!!

Also hungry coders will be happy to read that you can add custom code in your mashup, so you can tweak the generated JavaScript to fit your needs.

See you on a next post to learn what you can do with your mashup.

Popfly: Let's have fun!

pluginbaby — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:01:00 GMT

I've received my invitation for Popfly, so here we go!
This is a private alpha and you can store up to 25 Mb, request your invitation at www.popfly.ms

Popfly is a fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Silverlight experiences and web pages using pre-built “Blocks” that connect to online services. Popfly consists of two parts:

Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.
Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

Read the full announcement on Soma Segar's blog.

Not only you can build power Mashups in seconds, but NON-DEVELOPERS DO!

There is a 15 minutes screencast to learn more about using Popfly : Popfly Screencast, at the beginning they show how to build a mashup that display your World of Warcraft guild's members in a Photo Tiles in about 10 seconds!!!

I built my first mashup with the online GUI without code or tools.

Features offered by the online visual tool is just amazing, we clearly see the benefits of Silverlight.

Here is another one I made following the tutorial :
Get last 2 entries from Twitter (Twitter block) every 5 seconds (Timer block), Get GPS coordinates (GeoNames block) to display entries on a map (Virtual Earth block).

And you immediatly get the results :

A feature I like is that it keeps track of your developers keys, like Flickr, Google, etc... so you set them once and they are available for all your mashups.

Later I will make another post to show how to build a mashup in a few steps and use it in a web page without any code : that's fun!