Popfly Experience - Photos

This is a set of photos showing my experience whilst out in Seattle for the week, the photos can also be found on Flickr here.

Highlights of photos:

Sumo Fight - UK Vs Canada
Surface
Shooting Range
.NET Beer

Popfly Experience - Meet the Team

Video: The Popfly Experience 2 : Working with The Team

Heres the second of a series of videos that Ben and myself are doing from Seattle, talking to various memebers of the Popfly team.

Note: I look horriable sweaty at the start as I had been upholding British machismo by fighting Patrick in a sumo match (and it was hot!!).

Popfly Mashup and Custom Block

As part of the work experience that I have been doing with the Popfly team I have been creating a number of mashups that would be able to be demoed as part of presentations and then be used with hands on labs so that the audience could go and create these mashup's themselves.

One of the mashups that has been created for the hands on labs is the creation of a twitter friend comparer, this will compaire the number of friends one user has against the other and give the results on a bar chart. The user who deploys the app will hard code their own user name in the app and then embed it into a website or facebook. Anyone visiting that page will then be able to input their own twitter screen name to see has the most friends.

(a number of errors may still occour with the mashup due to problem with the twitter API)




Creating this mashup posed a number of problems, one of which was that currently none of the social network API's/blocks support getting the number of friends a user has. Instead the API returns an array of objects that represent a friend. The number of friends can then be found by the number of objects in this array.

To do this I created a custom block that checks the ammount of entrys in the array from the input blocks. This can work for any number of blocks of any type, so if a Facebook block returns 147 friends the count block will output an integer with the value of 147.

This allows the above mashup to get the number of friends each of the users have and then display this integer to the bar graph block as data.

The created mashup can be found here and the "count" block can be found under the tool sub folder in Popfly.

Popfly Experience - Video

Ben Nunney has put together a quick video covering our first couple of days out in Seatle a where we are doing some work for the Popfly team.


Video: Popfly Experience Video Blog 1

Making Games the Hard Way

Making Games...before Popfly Game Creator

Popfly, America and Jetlag

It's coming to the end of the second day out in America working with the Popfly team, and I thought it was only appropriate to undate everyone with whats been happening over this past couple of days.

The first day with the Popfly team, started of extremly early, with Ben and myself making it into the office (MS Building 41) for around 8:30, which is earlier than ive been out of bed this last couple of weeks :s

We met up with John Montgomery who is the GPM for the Popfly and Visual Studio Express teams, and John showed us around some of campus and introduced us to various people on his teams. Then on to set up in our own offices and start to flesh out some of the idea's that we have had for the projects that we will be doing this week.

This involved lots of writing on white boards (is alot cooler than it sounds) and story boarding our 3 presentations which will cover an "Overview of Popfly", "Mashup's", and "Game Creation". For each presention we will have to deliver a 60 minute presentation with a number of demos / builds, complete demos and walk throughs for presenters and also hands on labs for the audience to either complete in their own time or after the presentation.

With the outlines of each presentation done and we started on building up a number of demos that will be introduced into the slides, these include some great mashup's such as an Live Image search and display mashup and a recreation of the classic Amiga game "Bouncing Babies" (no babies were hurt in the production of this game!) whereby babies would have to jump from a buring building to be caught by the firebrigade below. We have also got an idea for a Deepdive for the mashups and block creation where we will use a number of different social networking sites and RSS feeds to either create a friend feed esq. sidebar app or an online presence idicator which can be put on your blog as "Blog Bling" (also check out Pimp My Live) to show visitors to your blog where else they can find more info about you, such as your twitter, FB or Flickr profies.

The second day we continued with our fleshing out of ideas and creation of demos and walkthroughs...

*edit* Remove mention of how horrid JavaScrip is *edit*

Along with the request for a Merge block to be included in Popfly (stay posted for the latest).

Needless to say after minimal sleep and alot of work, jetlag has started to kick in, however I will keep updating when more cool stuff happens.

Popfly Work Experience

One of the prizes for winning the UK leg of the Imagine Cup with our entry EnviroMatch is a week work experience with the Popfly. During this week Ben Nunney and myself will travel out to Microsoft headquarters in Seattle and meet up with some of the greatest minds in Microsoft.

The week will start out meeting with Andy Sterland, the Popfly Team's token Brit who was also a previous competitor in the Imagine Cup, representing the UK in India. Andy will show us round the offices and start us on our main project for the week. As well as doing general babysitting just in case Ben gets arrested (anything could happen) or i get lost on campus.

Creating a number of 60 minute presentations on the Popfly platform, creation of mashups and also a deep dive into programming (javascript pfft) custom blocks. Will update when i get more indepth information on these presentations.

During the week we also get the honour of meeting up with Anders Hejlsberg (wiki) , who is the lead architecte on the C# programming language. Hopefully we will be able to get some interesting sneak peaks on what Anders envisages for C# 4.0.

We will be out in Redmond from the 3rd till the 12th of August, anyone who is free to meet and talk tech drop me an email or a tweet (domgreen).

Best Ever Popfly Video

Just been browsing around on the Popfly site and managed to stumble upon this really funny "Live Action Demo" of how to create mash-ups in Popfly.

http://www.popfly.com/Videos/?video=liLiveAction


Who said you need a PC to use Popfly?

Popfly for the win!

Popfly has been nominatged for a CNET Webware 100 award and have been selected as one of the 300 finalists by CNET editors. However to get Popfly to we they will need all the votes they can get.

To vote for Popfly all you have to do is follow the below link, this will take you straight to thevoting page where Popfly is already checked.

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2008/vote_publish.html?compid=103440

Voting runs from now until April 21, so tell your friends and get them to vote also. The competition is pretty stiff, so it’s going to take a lot for Popfly to win.

MSP Live Meeting 2: Andy Sterland

On Monday the second MSP Live Meeting took place, with guest speaker Andy Sterland speaking on Popfly.

Andy who was previously a MSP himself, competed in the Imagine Cup in 2006 and managed to get to the world finals in India (see link). Now Andy has jetted off to Redmond and works on the Popfly Team.

The meeting open up with a quick introduction from our glorious leaders Mark and Mo, before launching Andy straight into the action (even thought it was 8am in Redmond). Andy then started his presentation with a quick run through of Popfly and how it enables non-developers to quikly build a mashup of various web services into a single application which can then be deployed to a webpage, gadget or even Facebook.

After the standard Flickr / Virtual Earth demo Andy started a bit more of a deeper dive, showing how blocks can actually be built up using a some real code all be it JavaScript. One thing to note is that since coming out of Alpha Popfly now uses Silverlight to display blocks etc. and can also be deployed on websites as a Silverlight app. however Andy did point out that Facebook only currently support Silverlight in the application page and not on profiles. This should hopefully be fixed in the near future when Facebook arn't "too busy making money".

One of the things that I had never seen before which come form the presentation was the ability to intergrate Popfly with Visual Studio by downloading the Popfly Explorer.