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Well I just finshed what will be the final update to Popfly, to place the shutdown notice on the front page. As John has blogged about on our team blog Popfly will go offline on 8/24.
If you do have projects on Popfly then you will lose access to them on 8/24 if you want to download you projects for prosperity (they won't run locally) then you can always add a .zip onto the URL of the project to get a packaged up zip. E.g.:
http://www.popfly.com/users/Team/Soccer.zip
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The other day I was looking at Bespin, a new online code editor from Mozilla, all told it’s a pretty slick responsive code editor with classification (syntax coloring) for HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It really seems like the online code editor space is going to heat up a bit as people integrate which is great. Indeed Popfly has had one from the get go (~2 years ago). At first the editor was built with textboxes and JavaScript which was all too messy and now a much improved version built on Silverlight (screenshot) thanks to work done by Chuck Jazdzewski. You’ll find it in places such as the game creator custom editor and on the mashup editor for when in a blocks “advanced view”.
Of course there are plenty of other online editors out there, now to just find a compelling business model for them…
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On a non Popfly related note James Lissiak (an SDE on Popfly) and myself are down at PDC helping Dan Fernandez out at the Coding4Fun & Channel9 lounge. Where we are talking about a UT 3 Bots for .NET a revamped version of the project we worked on at University and used in some labs for students with great success.
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For any of you who’ve used Popfly in the past you might of noticed that you could embed your games and mashups into Windows Live Spaces pages. Yet if you tried it today you’d be sadden to see the option has gone missing, d’oh our bad. While that bug waits to get fixed (it’s a p3L) you can use a mashup I just shared to generate the embedding link. All you need to do is enter your account name and project name and hit go, and like magic a link will appear. Click on it and you will be taken to Live Spaces where you can follow the wizard and embed your project.
http://www.popfly.com/users/Andy/LiveSpacesURLGenerator
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One of the blocks we recently added to Popfly is “Campaign Contributions”. As many of you know the 2008 Presidential race is on! As part of the race the FEC requires that all individuals who contribute $50 or more have to report it and subsequently they expose the contribution as public record. At Popfly we decided it would be fun to import that data and using .net 3.5sp1 data services create a block where you can query that information. The information we collect includes the name, employer/occupation, amount, zip code and of course who the money was given too. It’s all public domain and can be found on the FEC web site. By exposing the data in Popfly though you can create some mashups of the information.
Simple bar graph, the first mashup I made takes a ZIP code and returns all the people who donated sums up the money and puts it on a graph. You can see the mashup below (or on Popfly at http://www.popfly.com/users/Andy/Campaign%20Contributions%20By%20ZipCode), and you can copy it and create your own version at http://www.popfly.com/users/Andy/Campaign%20Contributions%20By%20ZipCode.project.
Go ahead open it up! See how it’s made and have a play.
You can also create a new mashup using the block by going to: http://www.popfly.com/mashupcreator and search for “campaign” and you should see the block “Campaign Contributions” you can also find it by expanded the “New & Updated” category.
Try some of the operations, write your own queries! Help for the block is at: http://www.popflywiki.com/users;popfly;Campaign%20Contributions.ashx and you can find some help for writing your own custom queries at: http://www.popflywiki.com/DataServiceQuery.ashx.
