monkey!

October 18, 2007

Microsoft launches Popfly, fancy drag-and-drop app builder

TechCrunch is reporting of the new Popfly service that Microsoft just released.

I gave it a go and it seems interesting. The mashup building is very reminiscent of Yahoo Pipes, although since it uses Microsoft’s Silverlight it’s much more eye pleasing and full of various 3D effects, and so on.

It’s a pretty interesting tool, the demo shows how you can create a simple Live Search demo that will display pictures from a PhotoSphere tool

You can get pretty deep down and dirty if you want, as it allows you to customize the HTML and scripting via a simple text editor if you need. Otherwise, it’s all dragging and dropping little 3D cubes and connecting them, assigning inputs, values, etc

I created a simple one here, that displays my Twitter friends (aka, Corey) messages in cute little bubbles. You can see my mashup here.

Apart from that, I don’t see this really going anywhere. What kind of developers will actually use this for something useful? The interface is kind of sluggish to boot and I’d rather not work on a MS platform.