Sunday, June 10, 2007

Microsoft’s PopFly at Maker Faire 2007

At the 2007 Maker Faire, I sat down with Dan Fernandez of Microsoft and went through a complete demo of Microsoft’s new visual tool, PopFly.  After testing it out, I have to say it shows a lot of promise and it’s fun!  It’s still in private alpha so it’s not completely stable yet (i.e. my Firefox browser kept crashing on a Mac) but you can see where it is going. 

PopFly allows anyone to create mashups online without coding.  You just drag and drop “blocks” and connect them together by dragging a line between them to create your result.  For example, you can pick a block that searches through your photos online at Flickr and connect that block with one that displays them as a slideshow. The slideshow can then be embedded on your blog or shared through the social network within PopFly.

Check out this video for a good preview:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/media/en/popfly/PopFlyin15.wvx

The closest thing I’ve seen to this is Processing, the open source programming language released in beta in 2005 that artists have been using to program images and create interactions and animation.