A View from Elsewhere

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!

Created by students. AlfredTh has the list.

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 of answers?

For once in my life, I have answers to both.

If you look in the upper right (next to your name) you’ll see the integrated help. That will open the Help window.
From there, you’ll get context-sensitive help. If a topic isn’t covered in the sidebar, you can click on the more help section on “How Do I…?” which will take you to the online documentation on http://www.popflywiki.com.
The page you’re looking for is linked to from several places – it’s called “How do I use uploaded files in my game?” and it’s here http://popflywiki.com/GameCreatorUsingUploadedFiles.ashx.
Once there, you’ll need to read the instructions, but they go like this. First, create a game (you’ve done this) and save it. Then upload the image. Go to the Game tab and on the right you’ll see the “Files” section. Click to add a file to your project, either from the web (e.g. from Flickr) or from your computer. Once it’s uploaded, save the project again.  I’m uploading john.PNG.
Now click on the Scenes tab and click on Draw. Then click on “Switch to XAML.” The screen should look roughly like the one on the right.
Next, add the XAML to include the file between the two <canvas> tags. In my case, I’ll add john.PNG. <Image Source="$base$/john.png" Canvas.Left="191" Canvas.Top="324" Width="200" Height="150"/> The Canvas.Left, Canvas.Top, Width, and Height control where the image will go and how large it will be. You’ll have to experiment to get it to the right position.
Save the game and run it. My “game” looks like this. I’ve saved it as http://www.popfly.com/users/johnmont/wonk.details, but we have examples in our tutorials of how to do this as well – the Canada Quiz in particular.

With the latest release of Popfly today, Adam created a game: Crayon Cannon. It's addictive.

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 turn brown and crispy, it has done exceptionally well.

Unfortunately, it had outgrown its pot. So over the weekend we bought a new, bigger pot, roughly large enough to serve as the cauldron the three witches use in the beginning of Macbeth. Last night I attempted the transplant. Today, though all the leaves are leafy and green, the plant is canted to one side much like a well-known tower in Italy.

Should I try to re-plant the plant, or leave it and see if it decides to straighten up?

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: All plumbing work takes three trips:

• Trip 1: Get the parts.
• Trip 2: Get the right parts.
• Trip 3: Get the parts you forgot in trip 2.

Oh, and at the end of this I should add the optional trip 4 to replace the parts from trips 2 and 3 that are defective out of the package.

Have I mentioned that plumbing is my least favorite home improvement task?

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 back in Seattle I'd go to the hardware store, buy replacement innards, and install them." But my mom's tool collection is a bit sparser than mine (no pneumatic tools, no table saw. Imagine! And her an 80-something year old woman!).

Then the light went on: hardware stores also sell tools. Two pairs of pump pliers and a couple of hours later, no running toilet.

Oh, and the review on Amazon of the Fluidmaster 400AK doesn't reflect my experience. I've used them several times on different toilets and they've always worked.

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 improved.

Just in case you were wondering.

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 reasons I love XM Radio in my car is I get two good classical stations (a station that plays "popular" classical (e.g. movements of symphonies) and one that plays full-length pieces that may be more complex). At home I have Comcast's Music Choice that has two similar stations. Because I have accounts with both, I get access to their web sites.

Now that I'm out of the office (and have headphones) I've spent a lot of time listening to both. I've come to the conclusion that, content-wise, Comcast and XM are about the same. The pops channels play the same assortment of Brandenburg concertos and movements from Tchaikovsky dances and the full classical channels play everything from Shostakovich string quartets to Ives to composers I've never heard of. Both music streams are of similar audio quality, at least on the $10 earphones I'm wearing (my Sennheiser headphones might show more difference but they're bulky to pack).

But I'm listening more to XM. Why? User interface. XM feels lighter-weight and puts my favorite channels at the fore. With Music Choice, it's many more mouse clicks to get to the UI where I tell it to switch to one of the two stations I want to listen to.

In any event, both Music Choice and XM are incomparably better than the local classical stations, sadly, especially since they have no commercials.

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 is a simple dish. To my sister, her husband, and my mom it was a complicated meal because I started the sauce last night. Though it was a basic meal (and only of fair quality since I chose a cut of meat that was, to be polite, filled with connective tissue) hey lauded it and me to no end.

And this is why I love my family.

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 and they would get out of sync. Read some at the office and then come home and I have to figure out where I left off in the unread items. But I love RSS Bandit. I've tried a host of other online and offline feed readers including all the big ones and I keep coming back to this simple desktop application.

With Phoenix, the team is working towards eliminating the one thing I haven't liked about the current product: synchronization. They're going to connect to online readers like Google Reader and enable you to synchronize through them.

So far, the alpha has treated me exceptionally well.

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 of the Smith Tower in Seattle, one of my wife's favorite buildings.

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 able to come out to Redmond to integrate the code this week.

In any event, I found myself trying to think of things that they should do to get the American experience. I had a long list of fairly normal things -- places to see and so on. But food is a distinct part of any country's culture that always speaks to me and I began to riff on foodstuffs and wound up listing things that I grew up thinking nothing about but seem to amaze and confuse people coming in from other countries. To wit:

• Wonder Bread
• Cheez Whiz
• Twinkies
• Ho Hos
• Spam
• Vienna Sausage
• Velveeta
• Pringles
• Campbell's Tomato Soup
• American cheese slices
• Swanson's frozen TV dinners

I have fond memories of all of these (except Spam). But this list gave way to the headline of this blog post.

Lord knows why I'm writing this.

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.

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) and I'm torn. We have an improved look and feel on the mashup editor (shown at the left), a dramatically improved projects page, and a better way of displaying help, as well as a few features that are kind of hidden in the product (let me know if you find them).

But I think my favorite is the support for creating full Facebook applications. We've been toying with what we call ".facebook" for a while -- ever since Facebook launched its JSON APIs, but with this iteration we made it so that you can not only publish to Facebook, but actually invite your friends to use the things you create using Popfly. It's still a little tricky since you need to do some things on both Popfly and Facebook and Popfly can't just make all the steps go away, but it's still pretty darned easy.