It’s been four months since I received my Popfly invite but haven’t really been able to do anything on it due to lack of time. Looking for Silverlight applications yesterday though I happened to bump into it and remembered that I already had an account so I decided to check it out. Well it seems that a lot have changed since the last time I’ve used it although the project is still in its Alpha phase.
First of all the user interface is completely revamped. It now loads up much faster and resembles more an office application than a web one.
Aside the obvious look and feel changes a lot of cool new features were added like:
A new web page designer that not only enables to choose between a large number of different styles and themes but also enables you to add your shared mashups to the page with the press of a button.
The Tweaking feature. Easier than ripping someone else’s project, tweaking enables you to change basic properties of that project and save it. For example, if see a great mashup that uses photos of cats, but you want to see dogs, you can now do it without needing to rip the entire project.
Facebook integration. Before, Popfly would publish a link to your profile page. Now you can embed an entire application. (Soon you’ll see my applications on my facebook profile 😉 )
JavaScript intellisence on the code editor when creating blocks.
The platform is far from complete, events are missing for example. I’d like to be able to call a block’s method when an event (e.g. user presses a button) is triggered on another block. This though does not mean that Popfly isn’t developing into a great platform for effortless and with no need of special skills development of Silverlight applications, mashups and web pages.
Can’t wait for the next version…
