Last week, Microsoft announced the release of PopFly, a simple program that allows users to create games without the need to know any code. Taking a number of genres as a foundation, PopFly offers a range of templates based on classic arcade games, upon which you can import your own characters, backgrounds, etc. Once done, the games can then be hosted, on stuff like websites, blogs, Facebook pages or even your Vista sidebar. It’ Silverlight-only, which is a slight hassle, and is fairly basic, but hey, who said everything on this world had to be perfect?
Microsoft PopFly

Some of you probably know and have used Microsoft’s PopFly! I did and I think it was a pretty cool online service and above all it was pretty fun to use… (Although it also a bit useless too). PopFly was the Microsoft’s response to the Web 2.0 fever that struck the internet some time ago. For those of you who didn’t know PopFly, it was an online service that allowed users to create mashups by simply dragging and dropping the features you want and connecting them together. This mashups could be sites, games, simple web apps, etc…

Well, at first this seemed to be pretty cool… The truth is this was useless, because there were few contents that I could really export from their site and use as standalone… Nevertheless, we could see some really great works in the popfly site, some of which took obviously lots of time and expertise to create. So, what does Microsoft decided to do with that? Shutdown popfly and destroy every single content that could not be exported!

I was registered in PopFly (and I had to obtain an invitation to join this “elite” in the beginning) and I had some work there… And all of that is now lost. Microsoft, I want you to give me back the time you wasted from my life! Well, at least they warned the users with some funny message which states: “Thanks for stopping by. Unfortunately, on August 24th, 2009, the Popfly service will be discontinued, all resources will be taken down, and access to your Popfly account, including games and mashups, will cease.”. So, I just want to thank you, Microsoft, for valuing my work so much…

But now, lets think for a while… PopFly came out in 2007 and at the time you needed an invitation to work with that thing. Somewhere in 2008 I think, the invitation system was removed and anyone could login. And now, only 2 years after its birth, PopFly is getting killed… In my opinion, this reveals two things: The first is that it was an amazing failure in the Microsoft’s strategy and planning. Because this was obviously expensive to Microsoft. Also, as you couldn’t obtain anything that really matters from this service, it was quite obvious to me that it wouldn’t work… The second thing is that Microsoft must be desperate with something and is trying to reorganize or redraw its strategy… Shutting down a service, even if it is useless and obsolete, is not Microsoft’s style… So, either they are planning something big and need to focus their resources on that or they are trying to reduce costs… Desperately…

But PopFly is not the only thing that Microsoft is killing… Microsoft Money (Microsoft’s Management Software System) was also discontinued and it will no longer have technical support. When I heard of that I thought: “What the hell is Microsoft Money? Never heard of it…”. Apparently it really existed… But not any more!

My opinion is that Microsoft will be closing some more stuff soon. Probably not its social Live Network, as social networking is Microsoft’s main bet now, but I don’t expect a long life for Skydrive, XNA, Live Mesh and Silverlight. The first is quite useful but is very expensive because it requires a huge online storage space. XNA represents an enormous investment from Microsoft, was well received and it is very useful as a prototyping tool. But NEVER as a game creation platform as they intended, because it is way too slow to be able to compete with a C++ engine, for example. Live Mesh is a complete failure in its implementation as I’ve mentioned in this post. Finally, Silverlight was Microsoft’s idea to compete with Flash. However, people got used to Flash over so many years and they don’t want to learn something new that doesn’t bring any real advantage over Flash (although Microsoft invested a lot on saying otherwise, which obviously isn’t true, at least so far).

So, Microsoft seems to be in a very bad and dangerous path… Maybe they will get it someday, but for the moment I think they are just desperate and trying to patch up some mistakes they made in the past few years. This said, I leave you with a sentence that I saw somewhere a while ago: 

Este post es continuación del post  RSS Popfly WebSlice[1] -Despidiéndome de PopFly. Para continuar con nuestro proyecto usaremos Expression Web 2.0.

1.-Abrimos Expression Web y creamos un nuevo Sitio Web Vacio

2.- Creamos un nuevo documento ASPX.

3.-Una vez preparado nuestro sitio y documento ASPX tendremos que ir a http://www.popfly.com/ , iniciar sesión y ver nuestros proyectos

.

.

4.- Buscamos el proyecto WebSlice Popfly RSS y damos clic en el titulo.

5.-Dentro de la pantalla del Mashup en la parte inferior derecha encontraremos un botón que dice Share  lo presionamos para poder compartir nuestro mashup. Si lo deseamos podemos subir una preview del mashup.

6.-Presionamos el botón de Embed para copiar el código que allí nos proporcionen.

7.-El código copiado nos servirá para llamar al mashup desde nuestra pagina ASPX

(*Se modificara el tamaño del iframe del mashup para que quepa en el WebSlice )

.

8.-Regresamos a Expression Web y en la pagina ASPX colocamos el siguiente código:

   1: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

   2: <%@ Page Language="C#" %>

   3: <html dir="ltr" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

   4: <head runat="server">

   5: <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />

   6: <title>Page RSS Popfly WebSlice</title>

   7: </head>

   8: <body>

   9: <div id="topten"class="hslice">

  10:  <h6 class="entry-title" style="display:none">RSS Popfly WebSlice</h6>

  11:   <div class="entry-content">   

  12:     <iframe style='width:283px; height:215px;' src='http://www.popfly.com/users/darkchicles/WebSlice%20Popfly%20RSS.small' frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

  13:   </div>

  14:  <a href="RSSPopfly.aspx" rel="entry-content"></a>

  15:  </div> 

  16: </body>

  17: </html>

En la linea 9: decimos que el contenido del div pertenece a un WebSlice [class=”hslice”]

En la linea 10:  Colocamos el nombre de nuestro WebSlice, tiene el [style display:none] para que no se muestre en la pagina

En la linea 11: Empieza el contenido de nuestro WebSlice

En la linea 12: Pegamos el código de nuestro Mashup de PopFly

En la linea 13: Se cierra la etiqueta div (de la linea 11) indicando que es el fin del contenido de nuestro WebSlice

En la linea 14: Esta línea hace la magia “llamándose a si misma la pagina”. Para que quede mas claro, la pagina se debe llamar RSSPopfly.aspx en este ejemplo.

9.- Guardamos la pagina con el  nombre de RSSPopfly.aspx y probamos dando clic en el icono de vista previa

Bueno el Resultado es el siguiente:

10.-Para agregar el WebSlice a nuestra barra de favoritos basta con dar clic en el icono de WebSlices

Una vez agregado nuestro WebSlice a la barra de favoritos el trabajo final queda:

Si desean el código fuente o tienen alguna duda, manden un correo a: darkchicles[ar]student-partners[dot]com

*Recuerden que esto es Exclusivo de Internet Explorer 8, , si no lo tienen bájenlo

*También recuerden que PopFly Cierra definitivamente el 24 de agosto, por lo que este post quedara inservible XD~ pero quedara como un homenaje póstumo.

Crearemos un lector RSS con PopFly, el cual será consultado con un WebSlice de Internet Explorer 8.

Entramos a: http://www.popfly.com 

1.- Creamos un Mashup

2.- Buscamos el cubo “RSS” y lo arrastramos al área de trabajo

3.-Damos clic en la “herramienta” para configurar el RSS

4.-Colocamos la dirección de nuestro RSS en mi caso coloco la del blog. presionamos aceptar para terminar de configurarlo

4.-Presionamos el icono del “foquito” y aparecerán sugerencias

5.-Seleccionamos el cubo “News Reader” y lo colocamos en el área de trabajo

6.-Unimos los cubos

7.- Configuramos el cubo de la siguiente forma

8.-El resultado final Sera el Siguiente:

No olvidemos guardarlo

Con esto terminamos la primera parte de nuestro WebSlice Popfly RSS en el siguiente post crearemos el WebSlice que se unirá con el Mashup que acabamos de guardar.

-Segunda Parte: http://darkchicles.wordpress.com/2009/07/19/rss-popfly-webslice2-despidindome-de-popfly/

Hace poco me llego un correo de PopFly el cual era un tanto alarmante, decía que el servicio se suspendería definitivamente, quise comprobarlo entrando a la pagina de http://www.popfly.com/ me encuentro con lo siguiente:

Important Notice: Popfly Going Away

Thanks for stopping by. Unfortunately, on August 24th, 2009, the Popfly service will be discontinued, all resources will be taken down, and access to your Popfly account, including games and mashups, will cease. Please see this blog post for more details

Aviso Importante: Popfly se va

Gracias por visitarnos. Lamentablemente, el 24 de agosto de 2009, el servicio de Popfly será suspendido, todos los archivos se borraran , y el acceso a su cuenta Popfly, incluyendo juegos y mashups, dejará de funcionar. Por favor, consulte este blog para más detalles

Aun no conforme, pregunte a una fuente confiable Rubén Mugártegui | Gerente de Desarrollo Académico Microsoft Mexico y su respuesta fue definitiva:

Desaparece por completo … 

Con esto una vez mas… una idea “buena” desaparece, pero que decir… la crisis les afecta a todos..

Buen trabajo Team PopFly

I was looking for a way to get regular updates from a job site about a particular category even though the site doesn’t offer any sort of feed.

Then I stumbled upon a site called Feedyes.com.

What I basically did was to have an RSS feed ready for the site. It’s pretty elementary with the help of the above site really. You don’t even need to register in order to create an RSS feed for a certain site.

Only problem was that I didn’t have the RSS feed in XML format. I had to go to the web site to view so. Also the feed couldn’t really be customized in any ways.

There’s another site named Page2rss.com which does pretty much the same. Mind you none of the above sites are perfect yet they do a reasonable job of it.

So I googled a bit more and stumbled upon Feed43.com which let me actually write expression for creating the feed.

Here’s what I came up with as an RSS feed version of this page. It lets you use ’search patterns’ using regular expression and ‘output templates’. It’s a handy site even with all its limitations for unpaid package like polling intervals, maximum feed limit etc. Do give it a try.

I know there are several good articles like Creating a generic Site-To-RSS tool, When RSS Fails: Web Scraping with HTTP and How To: Scrape a Web Page to RSS Feed for doing the kind of the same.

What’s more I don’t know if you know this but both Yahoo! and MSN provides search result in RSS format.

Here’s the result using Yahoo! web search service for ASP.NET MVC and here’s MSN’s version for the same.

But of course, it would help if Google was to have an XML feed of their normal Search engine positioning (SERPS) like Yahoo! & MSN do.

What it does provide though is an RSS feed for searching blogs. Try this.

There’s another gem I figured which actually lets you run XPath query for scraping into a web page for RSS. It can be used to search in an HTML document in a pretty straightforward way.

Well this has been a very long ride for scraping your way to another site but what if you want to stop others doing the same . Enough of RSS Scraping, Scavenging, Stealing, and Content Theft, no? Talk about having a dose of one’s own medicine, right?

Anyway, have a look at What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content or better still have a read about the antonym of Scraping in IT terminology Information Trapping.

To wrap things up, do remember there are words like Copyright and Intellectual property / Intellectual Property Protection in the dictionary . So use it in a positive way and enjoy the Scrapventure!

Update on 9th April, 2009: It was unfair on my part to leave off tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Feedity.com. While Yahoo! Pipes is a less than straightforward means to achieving our objective, it has powerful features like Visual query development which are missing from the rest. But I think what makes Yahoo! Pipes unique is that you can chain together arbitrary number of previous queries (pipes) and thus mash them up into one which would have all your filters/queries. It also provides input facilities. More on Yahoo! Pipes later on subsequent post perhaps when I would guide you through the process. Feedity.com, on the other hand, is a very straightforward means to achieving what we want. It’s quite efficient and intelligent with parsing too. Give it a try.

Update on 16th April, 2009: Microsoft Popfly mashup creator is another candidate for honorable mention

Check out the project from Microsoft  http://www.popfly.com

Utilizes Windows Live ID

HERE

Here are some assignments I have for this week:

AS10 – Popfly – Mar 10, Tue

Post a Popfly demo on your blog. http://www.popfly.com

AS11 – Dippity for your lifestream – Mar 10, Tue

Self-explanantory.  http://www.dipity.com/goodspeed

Another WEBDEVT requirement.

Ho da poco realizzato un quiz biblico con Popfly (tool on line di Microsoft basato su Silverlight) che potete eseguire andando a questa pagina.

Akin to how tools like Blogger enabled a legion of less html-savy web readers to also become web writers, there has been a recent burst of tools that may encourage less code-savy game players to become game builders. 

To paraphrase Seymour Papert, computer programming is the closest thing to thinking about thinking.  A similar hypothesis is growing around game design (and play).  Games are challenge-based, goal-oriented systems.  To play (and win) a game, you must understand the system and the system’s dynamics.  Failure is accepted, and in fact expected.  To move forward, you must adapt, iterate, and learn.  (More detailed post on the theories/literature to follow).  Arguably, building games requires an even deeper understanding of (content as) dynamic systems and an engagement in iterative reflection.   

Working list of education-related game design tools developed (some focused on teaching programming):

Alice: 3D programming environment developed by Carnegie Mellon for learning introductory programming concepts.  Graphics and a drag-and-drop interface facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience. 

Game Maker: (in version 7)  Application with drag and drop system for intuitive game creation.  Built-in scripting programming language for more experienced users.

Gamestar Mechanic: (In development) Massively multiplayer online game where players take on the role of Game Mechanics and create their own games to play and share.

Little Big Planet: Playstation Network game with three modes of Play, Create and Share.  In particular, the physics engine and level editor enables players to create, destroy, edit and manipulate levels and objects.

Popfly: (Beta) Microsoft free online game and mashup creator. 

Playcrafter:  Flash based web application that lets anyone create and share custom games with simple drag and drop features. 

RPG Maker: Program for users to create role-playing games.  Most versions include tile set based map editor, a simple scripting language, and a battle editor.  

Scratch:  Free software that enables kids (8+) to program interactive creations by snapping together graphical blocks like LEGO® bricks.

Stagecast Creator:  Visual programming language allowing kids to construct 2D simulations, animations, and games (Java).  Based on the idea of independent characters who represent objects containing logic.

The Games Factory (Klik & Play II): GUI interface lets users create 2D games through a grid-based interface

Toontalk:  Computer programming system for children.  Presented in the form of animated characters that can be trained by example.

Wild Pockets: (Beta) Web-based platform enabling creation of 3D games in a social way.

Microsoft’s popfly is an easy way to create widgets and mashups using Silverlight. With Popfly Game Creator, it is adding a simple Web-based authoring environment for creating casual arcade-style games.

The tool is built for non-programmers so that anyone can create a game, and is particularly aimed at kids and teenagers. It is entirely browser-based. You create a game using predefined templates that can be modified, and when you are satisfied, you hit play to run the code. The games run in Silverlight and will be hosted at Popfly, but are embeddable anywhere on the Web.

O Popfly é uma ferramenta de criação de jogos para web da Microsoft.

É uma boa opção para quem não tem nenhum conhecimento em programação mas mesmo assim gostaria de desenvolver seu próprio joguinho.

No pongo en duda los avances realizados en el desarrollo de software, pero a veces me pregunto si  no se tomó el camino más complejo para evolucionar.

Programar en COBOL, era algo muy sencillo. Tenías un lenguaje con unas 200 o  250 sentencias, de las que habitualmente usabas 50 o 60. Y con eso,  se podía construir todo.

Hoy,  si hablamos de las plataformas de desarrollo actuales, posiblemente estemos hablando de que para resolver un problema utilizaremos varios lenguajes, con distintos estilos, con los que dispondremos de un catálogo con  miles de funciones. Es cierto que podemos hacer muchas más cosas, pero a costa de añadir una complejidad mucho mayor.

Y en medio de todo esto, algo de aire fresco, aparecen dos herramientas , Scratch y Popfly Game Creator. Las dos sirven para lo mismo, crear juegos y animaciones multimedia digamos que uno es un juguete para niños (Scratch) y el otro para jóvenes (Popfly).

De una forma fácil e intuitiva (mas en Scratch que en Popfly), y sin saberlo, ¡se está programando!

Detrás de Scratch está el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusets (MIT), detrás de Popfly, Microsoft.

Quizás no sean más que juguetes, pero quizás sean, las bases de las futuras herramientas de desarrollo que se utilizarán profesionalmente.

Si es así, yo apuesto por este camino. Vivimos en un mundo, en el que se usan el burro y el jet como medios de transporte. Igual sucede en las tecnologías de la información, junto con las últimas novedades conviven sistemas basados en tecnología de hace 40 o 50 años, y todo de una forma más o menos armónica.

Si Scratch o Popfly, son un adelanto de lo que serán las herramientas de desarrollo del futuro, esto permitirá que quienes ahora guían un burro, o conducen una bici,… Puedan en un futuro muy cercano guiar un nuevo medio de transporte con las ventajas de un jet y la simplicidad de una bici

Howdy there guys.

I’ve been messing around with Popfly this weekend, and it’s certainly great fun.  There a slew of functionality, and you can always write your own code too.

I’ve started with a simple asteroids-style game I’ve dubbed “Astropuppy”, on account of the evil puppies you must shoot before they blow up your fragile spaceship.  Naturally, no game is a game without crates, so I’ve added in randomly spawning crates that give you health.

The game is hosted on Facebook and onon Popfly, and you can try it out there.  Make sure to visit Popfly and try out your hand at game design;  I’ll be giving a demo of how to get started at Imagine ‘08 at UWA this Tuesday.