A View from Elsewhere : Popfly

Popfly Game Engine Code on Codeplex

johnmont — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:25:00 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: Popfly,MS-PL,Codeplex

Popfly Game Creator Beta, or "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges..."

johnmont — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:21:09 GMT

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 structured data storage system, we worked with Mark Frydenberg at Bentley College to design mashup curriculum, and we launched a game creator that puts the creation of casual games within the reach of people who don't have CS degrees.

Yesterday we moved from the alpha release of the game creator to beta in time for the PAX conference here in Seattle. Ben Anderson from our team will be at PAX giving demos, so if you're there drop by and harass him. Or just post on his Popfly profile page.

By the way, the title of this post is an allusion to two movies and the fact that Popfly now supports achievement badges -- for example, if you play a game late at night, you get the Night Owl badge.

Technorati Tags: Popfly,Silverlight,Casual Games,PAX,Penny Arcade Expo,Learn to Program

Time to Brag!

johnmont — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:28:41 GMT

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

Ten Fun Popfly Games

johnmont — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:22:23 GMT

Created by students. AlfredTh has the list.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Casual Games, Students

Adding Your Images to Games

johnmont — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:59:00 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: Popfly,XAML,Games

How to Make a Popfly Application a Full Facebook Application

johnmont — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:16:52 GMT

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

Popfly: My Favorite Feature This Time

johnmont — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:56:15 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Silverlight, Facebook

What People Do with the Game Creator

johnmont — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:50:40 GMT

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

Why Build a Game Creator?

johnmont — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:38:09 GMT

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 made the argument in the past that something like Popfly is competing for attention with things like TV or Xbox more than something like Visual Studio.

Courtesy Jon Udell, I found a much more articulate way of thinking about this: a blog post from Clay Shirkyon called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:

Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Yes, I do. If we can get even 1% of the casual-game-playing population to try to build a casual game -- to move from consumer to producer -- we've done a big thing.

Oh, and the other reason I love this post is that it defends Lolcats:

It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too."

I have a soft spot for Lolcats.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, social surplus, participation

Popfly on Moonlight

johnmont — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:51:24 GMT

I'll be darned. Daniele Muscetta has Popfly running on Moonlight.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Virtual Earth, Moonlight, Silverlight, Mashups

Popfly in the News

johnmont — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:04:21 GMT

You probably already know that Mark Frydenberg at Bentley College used Popfly in some of his introduction to information technology courses. Campus Technology magazine pointed to his work to show how Bentley is trying to teach the impact of technology on business practice.

When students use Popfly to create mashups -- such as geotagged photos of mountains from Flickr mashed up with Virtual Earth data to place the photos of mountains on a map in the countries where they lie -- they see an illustrative example of Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 principle that "Data is the next Intel Inside."

Mark just forwarded me this link because the hardcopy of the magazine came out and because he and Philip DesAutels will be speaking at a conference this summer.

What's interesting to me (aside from the fact that Popfly could be useful in education) is how this dovetails with CMU's Computational Thinking ideas.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Education

Popfly Update

johnmont — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 06:44:39 GMT

Earlier in the week we quietly updated Popfly. Why quietly? Because we really didn't add any new features. We fixed some bugs, sure, but mostly what we did was roll out an improved caching system. Between the middle-tier cache and changes we made to take better advantage of the browser's cache, we're seeing anywhere from a 2X to a 6X performance improvement when you load an existing mashup. A lot of this work is in CacheMan, which Sriram (a dev on our team) implemented as a personal project and which turned out to be useful in Popfly.

I waited to post about it mostly because... Well, mostly because I'm lazy. But also because caches are among the most complicated things to get right. Caching -- especially multi-level distributed caches -- are very finicky. I'm happy to say that this one is working. At least for now.

You should notice that your embedded mashups like the one on Soma's blog or the one on the Express download page should load much more quickly. Even more quickly if you refresh the page.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, caches

It's About the Data

johnmont — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:18:04 GMT

Popfly, a mashup tool, depends on three things: data that is simple to access programmatically, interesting, and available under terms that enable users to work with it. As with most software endeavors, you can pick two.

The government has a huge amount of interesting data that's available under really great terms. Weather? Check out http://www.noaa.gov. Financial information? Start with http://www.sec.gov. Crime statistics? Dig around in http://www.usdoj.gov/. But how much of this is programmatically accessible? Very little, as it turns out. I'll pick on NOAA for a little bit. They have great weather information at http://www.weather.gov -- enough that you can find out whether the weather this weekend is going to be good at the local fishing holes and whether the fish will be biting. But, despite the RSS feeds, the really interesting data (the forecast and the information about water conditions) is locked up in a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and GIFs. If you play with EDGAR (for information on SEC filings), you'll find a confusing array of HTML, static XML, and .txt files.

Yes, you can program your way out of these, but it's far too hard. Entire organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation are trying to change this, and Lawrence Lessig has proposed what he calls the Open Government Data Principles. And that's great. But it's not enough, because it's not just the government.

I'll take another example. Let's say that you want to create an application that will check your favorite online bookstore for the books it might recommend you purchase next, and submit that list to your local library to see which books are in and maybe even offer you the ability to put one on reserve. This is an example that Jon Udell outlined something like six years ago. Unfortunately, when you think about it, the bookseller really doesn't want you to use the local library: they want you to buy books from them. So it would be a logical extension to look at the terms of use for the booksellers APIs and see indications that scenarios that take you away from their site will be frowned upon. Of course, this makes sense to me since they're a business, but it's a case that the data is interesting and available, but the terms are restrictive for the scenario I'd like to build.

Oh, it's not just the booksellers who have terms like that. Any site that makes money off of advertising, for example, is going to have holdbacks in its API terms -- limits on how many calls you can make to the APIs in a given time period or how many results can be returned, or how their brand has to be shown in the resulting mashup, and so on.

As I read a Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse blog post about how much time each candidate spends talking about different issues, I thought, "There's an interesting mashup that I would have loved to build." But the information to create that mashup isn't easily accessible to tools.

Why must good data be so hard to find?

Technorati Tags: Popfly, mashups, Silverlight, Lessig, Sunlight Foundation

Popfly Nominated for CNET Webware 100

johnmont — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:09:48 GMT

Today Popfly was nominated for a Webware 100 award. As you can see on the Popfly team blog, this means we need people to help us by voting for Popfly. So please vote for Popfly. Just like regular elections, you can vote up to three times. (Yes, that's a joke.) And please encourage your friends to vote for Popfly. You can also help out by either reposting this blog entry to your own blog or by pointing people at it.

Winning isn't everything, but it's a lot. ;-)

Technorati Tags: Popfly, CNET Webware 100 Awards

Applying The "Ken Burns" Effect to Your Photos

johnmont — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

One of the things that Popfly does well is take photos from one place (e.g. Flickr, Live Image Search, Facebook, Live Spaces) and display them in another (e.g. your blog) in pretty ways. Tim on our team created a really nice block called "MovingSlideShow" that takes simple photo display a step further: it pans around the photos, much the way Ken Burns (the director of the documentaries The Civil War and Baseball) did to make static photos from historical archives seem more alive.

As a demonstration: if you recall my wife and I bought one of the Seattle Pigs -- Puerco Vaca -- who is still sitting in our back yard. (Yes, "who," not "which." He's a family member now.) Previously I'd used the phototiles block to display photos of Puerco. In this blog post you'll see what the same photos look like using MovingSlideShow.

So what does this mean to you? If you like what you see and want it on your own blog for your photos, just Tweak the mashup. From the Popfly Tweak screen you can change search terms or even go into the full editing mode to change data sources. For example, instead of just pulling photos from a Flickr search, I built a mashup that pulls photos from a Facebook photo gallery and a Flickr search as well. As my subject matter, I used Robert Scoble (a relatively safe subject since there is a substantial amount of content on the Internet by and about Robert) and the book "Naked Conversations." The result is actually a moving slideshow of some of Robert's more recent activities.

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Mashups, Robert Scoble, Naked Conversations, photos