South Asia MVP Open Day 2008, Photos

Here are some of the Snaps taken by my MVP Lead Abhishek Kant from the South Asia MVP Open Day 2008 held in Goa.

This slide show mashup has been prepared using Microsoft Popfly.

(Will take some time to load on slower connections.)

Play Silverlight Olympics Games

With Olympics starting tomorrow and enjoying them online with Silverlight, how about playing the games yourself ? Check out these cool games created using Silverlight and  Popfly Game Creator. Thanks Tim.

 

• Torch Lighting
• Soccer
• Track and Field
• Archery
• Long Jump
• Weightlifting
• Boxing
• Gymnastics
• Diving
• Synchronized Swimming

They are really fun to play. I liked the Torch lighting game very much. Try your hands and get into medals List.

I will add here, if you haven’t tried Popfly Game Creator, try it and create your own games. It’s a non-programming tool for gaming, so it will make it easy, even if you are not a programmer.

Voting is open for 2008 Webware 100 Awards

Check out this year's nominations in CNET Webware 100 awards for the top 100 coolest online apps! To be nominated is a great accomplishment. We can make a Webware 100 winner by voting for it.

Many of Microsoft products have been nominated in various category, some of them are:

In the audio category- Zune Marketplace

In the Browsing category- Internet Explorer, Silverlight, Windows Live Home

In the communication category- Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Hotmail

In the Productivity category - Office Live Workspace

In the Publishing and photography category - Popfly

In the Search & Reference category - Microsoft Virtual Earth, Live Search

And there are many more. So if it happens to be your favorites, just click on the above links to vote.

Voting will run until March 31. Winners will be announced on April 21.

Popfly updated

An updated version of Popfly was released on 14th Feb. The updated version of Popfly includes :

- Now you can have your own data source for creating mashups. The data source editor is presented and the comma separated values are converted into yellow data source blocks for use in the mashup designer.

- Improved search interface for projects and users.

- Better Block building, Now you can upload images or any other supporting files to the block.

- Now you can put comments on profile pages thus reaching other community members.

- Better ways to invite friends, one can find if a friend has already been invited by the improved contact list import feature.

- Addition of new blocks such as, MovingSlideshow (with smooth panning and zooming transitions) and RSSList, these can be put in ones blogs sidebar.

- Popfly Help has been relocated to wiki - www.popflywiki.com, now the Pofly teamas weel as the whole community can contribute.

- Silverlight support in Popfly Explorer

These are very good additions, making it more attractive and useful, if you haven't yet tried it just give it a try at Popfly!!

31 Microsoft Technologies demos in 40 minutes

Check out this cool compilation of 31 Microsoft Technologies in 40 minutes by Nigel Parker where he demonstrates these Technologies explaining them in simple words. Its presented in an interactive interface where you can jump from one demo to other.

Also there's a download link to download the video, if you want to (can also download it from here. ) (227 MB)

These are the technologies covered in the demo, put here with their links and timeline:

1. Microsoft Research Group Shot (00:20)
2. Sea Dragon (TED Video) (01:31)
3. Photosynth (02:45)
4. Microsoft Research HD View (Auckland, Wellington) (04:04)
5. Virtual Earth (Live Labs on the Map) (05:35)
6. Bill Buxton's Presentation from Expression around the Clock (07:27)
7. Microsoft Surface (09:40)
8. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Surface Demonstration (Video Support) (10:17)
9. French Silverlight 1.0 Application (Script#) (10:48)
10. Tablet Features in WPF - Inking Over Video Sample, Ink Support Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight Ink SDK Sample (11:17)
11. Silverlight 1.0 Inking Search Sample (11:45)
12. Live Image Search (filters) (12:20)
13. Tafiti Search Visualization (13:05)
14. GPS location based interactive community (Where is Frank?) (14:09)
15. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Invaders - Code (14:48)
16. Contoso Bicycle Club - Windows Live Quick Applications (16:03)
17. Live Messenger Integration Demo - Details (17:07)
18. http://backgroundmotion.com - Code/ Source Code (20:00)
19. Microsoft Popfly (22:21)
20. Windows Live Photo Gallery (26:16)
21. Windows Home Server (26:55)
22. LCI Intégrale (28:30)
23. Livestation (29:28)
24. WebGuide (30:03)
25. hsn.tv (31:25)
26. thirteen23 :: denounce (32:04)
27. How About It? (32:47)
28. the-hub.tv (33:53)
29. Glenn Conner Interview - Amazon Demo Silverlight 1.1 Alpha (34:30)
30. Building a 3D WPF Gesture Application - Code (35:24)
31. Building a Video Player in 8 mins with Silverlight 1.0 (36:42)

Sit back and enjoy the video.

UPDATE: As I found out and Nigel has also posted about it now, that when you go to the Microsoft Research Group Shot site and tries to download it, you'll get 'specified file not found ' message. This is because as Nigel points out "The Group Shot Beta period has expired. We are currently considering several options to bring Group Shot back. Please stay tuned to this site for information on future releases." (link).

Popfly among top 25 Most Innovative Products of 2007

Microsoft Popfly features among the Top 25 Most Innovative products of 2007 announced by PC World.

Others in the list includes: Google Gears, Apple iPhone, OLPC XO, Time Machine - in Mac OS X 10.5, Amazon Kindle, NetGear Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000, HP TouchSmart IQ770 PC, AT&T Tilt, Facebook API, DeviceVM Splashtop, Toshiba Portege R500, Data Robotics Drobo, Hybrid Hard Drives, Eye-Fi Card - about which I had posted earlier, Panasonic TH-42PZ700U, Yamaha Tenori-On, Zoho Notebook, 'In Rainbows' by Radiohead, IOGear Wireless USB Hub and Adapter, Mint.com, Sprint Airave, Ask.com, eXpresso, Kodak EasyShare All-In-One Printers.

What's new in Popfly?
Popfly team site, thanking for this award has posted about some new features to Popfly:
Email notifications. If you have a Popfly account you probably got an email from us recently letting you know that we've added a feature so that Popfly will send you email when certain things happen, for example, when someone adds you as a friend.
Advanced Halo 3 Gamer Card. We've created a new block that shows Halo 3 statistics for you and your friends, with special attention to working well on Facebook.
E-Cards. It is the holiday season, and what holiday would be complete without being able to send your friends your mashups as e-cards?

Popfly goes Beta and Book on Popfly to be released

Popfly has turned Beta now. After getting feedback from alpha testers and ironing many bugs, Popfly team has released the Beta version.

Now there's no invitations required, you just need a Live ID to get into Popfly. So if you haven't tried yet , just try it once and you'll like it. If you want to know more about it , you can check out my earlier posts and also can check the demo videos at the site.

Here are the new features added: (Introducing Popfly Beta: Open to All)

• Gadgets. Popfly can create both Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets and Windows Live gadgets.
• Tweaking and Properties. Last iteration, we added “tweaking,” but many blocks didn’t have a lot of properties to tweak, so we added properties to a host of our output blocks including Photoshow, Virtual Earth, PhotoSphere, Gauge, and Page Turner.
• Tweaking and the color picker. When you tweak a mashup you now have a color picker so you don’t have to remember the alphanumeric codes for colors.
• New and updated blocks. Popfly has a category for new and updated blocks.
• New screencasts. Updated videos explaining how to use Popfly.
• New blocks. Notably one we did for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit.
• Updated block documentation. Courtesy Andy, our resident block program manager.
• Privacy statement. We’ve also slightly modified our Privacy Statement, so check it out.

This was about the Beta release of Popfly.

Now about the Book on Popfly to be released.

Eric Griffin, the author, announce about this new book from Apress, "Foundations of Popfly-Rapid Mashup Development" to be released in January/February 08.

New features in Popfly

Yesterday a new version of Popfly was deployed with cool new features.

• A new faster and cleaner user interface.
• Blocks organised by categorySearching for projects, top projects, and top contributors
• The ability to email links to your friends
• Block properties, for example, you can change things such as the frame color
• Digg and Reddit buttons

Apart from these, there's Tweaking, which makes it easier than ripping , if one just wants to change and savebasic properties of a project.
Integration with Dapper.
Embed in Facebook.
For more details , please check the source : Popfly Team Site.

I am Popflying !!

Yesterday I received the invite for Popfly and I am now Popflying !
As posted earlier, it requires Silverlight1.0, and after creating my profile, there was no problem in logging into Popfly. No downloads or install required.Trying out various options, its very easy to get familiarise with Popfly. All the available blocks loaded quickly when trying out creating mashups. But once you are in say Create a mashup page from the Popfly Homepage, its a bit confusing to return back to Home Page.
Tried various options like creating my Homepage, trying out mashups by joining blocks, its simple, cool and easy.Still lots to be explored, not yet tried out building your own block or any coding part or the Popfly Explorer Alpha, a separate download, a Visual Studio add-in, for sharing Visual Studio projects. Overall, its a cool tool.
Thanks Popfly Team for the invite, thanks Suzanne!

Popfly Wallpapers

Make these Popfly wallpapers as your Desktop backgrounds.

Microsoft Popfly

Microsoft released a web tool called Popfly , its in a private alpha at present and needs an invite to get your hands on it. Well, after seeing the demo of Popfly on Channel9, i can say, its a very interesting tool.
It supports IE 6 and 7 (Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista) and Firefox 2 (Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X). It requires Silverlight 1.0 beta.
Silverlight 1.1 support will be added in the future.

Its a web based tool for creating, sharing, copying, embedding web mashups, gadgets, applications and web pages among friends, that too without writing a line of code. So its a tool that can be used by non developers and developers, who of course, can write codes as well.
So Popfly Creator tools are designed to enable you to create Web experiences without being a programmer. Connecting services on the Web is as easy as drawing a line between two blocks. Popfly creator also enables you to create static Web pages and even insert custom mashups
directly into your static page.Mashup designer is built using Silverlight1.0 beta providing rich interactive experience to create your applications.

It also has Popfly Explorer which is a Visual Studio 2005 add-in that enables you create, modify, and share Visual Studio solutions from your Popfly Space.
Once you share your application with your friends, that can be rated, ripped according to ones needs.So just goto the Popfly site for more details of what else it can do, watch the screencast and sign up for the invite.