A View from Elsewhere

Though we decommissioned Popfly last Monday, Ben Anderson from the (former) Popfly team worked his magic (along with a lot of help from others, including our legal team) to get the Popfly Game Engine code on Codeplex under the MS-PL. Give it a look...

This post started as a collection of thoughts on the AP’s decisions around how they want their content handled on the web. Somehow this lead me to thinking about the FTC’s proposal for guidelines about full disclosure . But as I was writing it, I had...

Gidget, the chihuahua best known for her role as the Taco Bell dog, has died . While sad news (I grew up with Gidget on TV) I couldn't help but smile at this image: "But, she said, Gidget had been the victim of typecasting, which limited her career...

When I announced that we were closing down Popfly, one of the biggest questions I got was how users could save their content. For the most part, that's not really feasible, but over at Coding4Fun, Dan has posted a link to a tool that was written by two...

A couple of years ago , a group of us decided to try something different: to create an online service to help people learn to program. Along the way we learned a lot about operating a large-scale web service, about the interesting legal and privacy situations...

As part of our remodel, considerable work was done on the front porch. Unfortunately, that work didn't include putting up the railings. This weekend has been the weekend for me to replace them. This has involved purchasing 4x6s and 2x4s to create the...

Popfly , which we opened to the public last fall as a web mashup tool, has come a long way. Over the last ten months we launched an add-in for Visual Studio ( Popfly Explorer ) so people could create and open projects on the Popfly site from VS, a lightweight...

About a month ago my wife and I attended the Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon . With a name like that, I had no idea what to expect. When we showed up we paid our $20 admission (<cough>) and walked in. When we arrived, it looked like a miniature version...

A customer noted yesterday that the patch for "big VS" (that is, Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Professional, and Visual Studio Team Suite) doesn't patch Visual Studio Express . We did this because of the patch size: in the past Express customers...

Have you created a really cool Popfly project? If so, we want to hear from you! Click here to send us your story and you may be featured on our site! Technorati Tags: Popfly

Created by students. AlfredTh has the list . Technorati Tags: Popfly , Casual Games , Students

A coworker who is teaching Popfly to his daughter just asked me, I'm working with my daughter who is working on a game and she wants to import a picture to be an actor. How does she do that? And is there a wiki or other site to get these kinds...

My wife has had a houseplant for the past ten years. It's one of those plants with huge leaves that thrives on being ignored. Despite ridiculous underwatering and one notable experience where we left it in the sun for a couple of days and it started to...

Plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task. Today I tried to repair the drain in my mom's front bathroom. The pop-up wouldn't go up and down. Based on this and all my previous plumbing experience, I have come up with John's Rule of Plumbing:...

The toilet in the bathroom I was using in my mom's house was running. Not a "jiggle-the-handle" kind of running -- more like an "unstoppable-gallon-an-hour" kind of run. I lived with it for a couple of days, thinking, "If I were...

When Pandora launched it garnered a lot of coverage in the mainstream press. I tried it then and found, as with most music sites, that its classical knowledge wasn't very good. I went back today, propelled by I don't know what, and found it much, much...

When traveling, I often like to listen to music. Unfortunately my choice of music tends to be classical. Classical music listeners are a minority, and most places have at best one classical station and that will be filled with commercials. One of the...

Every time I'm out visiting my mom, I cook a few times. I'm not sure why, I just do. This time I made something that I thought was simple -- home made marinara sauce with grilled steak, fresh mozzarella cheese, and lightly-dressed arugula . To me this...

I'm an RSS Bandit user. I have been for years -- before I knew it was written by Dare Obasanjo . He and his RSS Bandit team on Sourceforge have been working on it for years. It has one deficiency that I haven't liked: I read feeds on multiple computers...

One of my friends, and a former teammate, is Aaron Brethorst . For the longest time I thought of him as the amusing guy from VScore who attended shiproom. It was only later that I realized he was an accomplished photographer . The photograph below is...

Earlier this week, two engineers from Microsoft in Germany (Sebastien Peray and Marcel Tilly) joined the Popfly team to work on adding a feature to Popfly. They invented a clever way to substitute one Popfly block for another a few months ago and were...

In this short screencast , I'll show you how to take a Popfly application (in this case, a mashup) and turn it into a full Facebook application using the ".facebook" feature of Popfly. Technorati Tags: Popfly , Silverlight , Facebook , Screencast

The neat thing about working on a team that updates its product every 4-5 weeks is that every 4-5 weeks I get to have a new favorite feature. With yesterday evening's update to Popfly I had a bunch to choose from (Adam Nathan outlines many of them here...

In two weeks we've gotten a bunch of interesting, fun games built with the Popfly Game Creator. Some of the team's personal picks are now on our Wiki . I wound up playing Ninja Ball for quite some time. Technorati Tags: Popfly , Silverlight , games

Several people have asked me, "Why would we do this?" They imply that there are so many better things to do. I typically speak about it in terms of increasing the potential universe of people who can create -- developers of a sort. And I've...