Mixing it up in the Campus with Popfly and Silverlight
Today I spent the day at a free event hosted by Microsoft, ‘Mix in the Campus’. This event featured presentations on a range of topics including emerging Microsoft technologies, games development for PC and XBox with XNA, Microsoft Expression Web and Web careers.
The new technologies coming from Microsoft HQ seem to have an increased focus on the “User Experience”. User experience seems to be the buzzword of the past 12 months and Microsoft is certainly helping to fuel this. Office 2007 is a prime example of this, with it’s new Ribbon interface. But it’s not just the Office team getting there hands dirty with usability. The Expression Studio line of products has well and truly replaced the company’s lagging FrontPage product. These new tools aim to bridge the gap between Designers and Developers to create more harmonious interfaces.
A new framework called Silverlight has also just been released. Silverlight’s goal is to bridge the gap between the web and the desktop. Web applications are able to be accessed from anywhere in the world, but have in past lacked an interactive interface. Silverlight provides a way to easily create visually stunning and highly interactive web applications, and also create desktop applications that pull data down from the web.
Popfly is another exciting technology that’s in Public Beta phase. I must confess that while I’d heard of Popfly I’d never actually tried it out. That was until Mix. I have to say I’ve just spent the last hour playing around with it and it is definitely something notable. In less than 10 minutes I managed to have an animated carousel of my friends from Facebook that I could quickly drop into a webpage and display for the world to see:
Bottom line - it looks impressive but took only 10 minutes to make! I think that this kind of technology is really going to take off, given the popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
There are heaps more demo’s of Popfly at http://www.popfly.ms/. All that’s needed is a Live account and you can try it out for yourself.