Palegoldenrod

So I discovered Popfly last night, and got access to the alpha this morning (muahahaha).

For those that don’t know, Popfly is a Microsoft Silverlight project, where people from non-development backgrounds can create mini sites and mashups without having to write code.

lol. I can see the look on your face. “Popfly?Silverlight? Mash… up? Is this just more Micro$oft jargon that really doesn’t mean anything?”. Well for once I can say no, it does actually mean something. But it may not mean as much as you think

To simplify it for you, the closest known thing to Silverlight is probably Adobe’s/Macromedia’s Flash. Its a means of bringing rich media and interactivity to the web environment in a predictable fashion.

Popfly uses Silverlight to technologies. Popfly, an alpha only at the moment, is a place for non-developers to take advantage of the rich interface to do some things they may not normally do. OK, build a website without writing code – big deal. WYSIWYG editing is nothing new. But creating Mashups without code – well, mashups are new, and being able to create them without code is kewl.

I’ve gazed into my amazing crystal ball of phuture-ness and I declare that mashups will be the next craze. Why? Because they are the way to a lazy man’s instant website, and everyone is lazy. Want to build your site which actually just has stuff from other sites? Thats what a mashup is.

What if your site is really just made up of blocks of information that can be sourced from elsewhere: your RSS feed from bloglines, your photo set form Flickr, your character profile from Warcraft and a few other bits and pieces… Well, some enterprising young developers have written some bits and pieces of code that will do each of these for you.� All you need to do is put them together, and Popfly even makes that easy and fun.. you have a list of available “Blocks”, which you can just drag and drop into your working space.

For example, I might drag in the Flickr block and the Photo Slideshow block. I tell the Flickr block where to find my photos, and then I link the Flickr block to my Slideshow block (by drawing a line between the two). So now I have a nice pretty slideshow to put on my site, which is displaying photos from my Flickr collection. Awesome, wot. You can even develop your own blocks, but this actually requires some coding to occur (hey, you’ve got to start somewhere).

OK, so its not like “O.M.G. that is sooo coool!!!1111 one.” But it is sorta cool – probably not something I will lose an awful lot of time using, but it is interesting to look at and use – partly because it uses Silverlight, partly because it will be non-developers who will be using this, and its always interesting to see how us developers are slowly being made obsolete, hehehe. At least they still need us to build the blocks, huh.

The biggest surprise for me when I logged into Popfly was that Silverlight installed and ran on my Mac (yes, Safari even). After being frustrated with one other cool Microsoft product which not only demanded that I be using IE7, but that I also run Vista (nooooo!), this was great to see.

I’ll follow up shortly with some screenshots of what this all actually looks like… It won’t be that Flickr example, thanks to my ongoing issues with Yahoo and flickr (I’ll save that rant for another post).

Anyway, as I said, I’ve only had access to this as of this morning, and haven’t had much time to play with it after work. I’ll play around a bit more and put together some examples for you so you can see what I am on about.

If you are playing with the Popfly alpha too I’d be interested in hearing your comments on it, as I’m sure some other readers are too

(See, told you it was sorta a real post. So ner).