Popfly Team Site

With summer upon us, it's time to update Popfly again. Yesterday we updated our servers with a host of new features including updates to the game creator, the mashup editor, and many overall site improvements. Adam Nathan has written an excellent post on a lot of these improvements, but some of the biggest are:

• Full Facebook applications. For a long time you've been able to publish Popfly creations to Facebook, but now you can make them full Facebook applications, including the features necessary to use Facebook's friends network to invite your friends to use your applications.
• New mashup editor UI. The mashup editor is now consistent with the game creator UI, which should make it a lot easier to use.
• Publish your own game actors. Until now, if you created an actor for your game you couldn't share it. Now you can.
• Better project page. We've improved the page that's generated for each project, making the layout easier to understand and adding information such as the number of views each project has gotten.

There's a lot more in this release, so come back and visit.

Our announcement two weeks ago of the Popfly Game Creator caused a lot of people to come to the site and build interesting, fun games. Some of the team's personal picks are now on our Wiki. Check them out!

The Popfly Game Creator comes with a set of video tutorials on the Popfly Wiki that show you how to use it. If you just watch one video today, you should probably watch something else, but if you are going to watch two, watch one of these.

Today we’re adding something special to Popfly: an early version of our Popfly Game Creator. That’s right: Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build.

What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario™, Frogger™, Asteroids™, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code. The game creator has over 15 pre-built game templates for you to try, hundreds of images, animations, backgrounds, and sounds for you to use in the games you create, and, of course, a way for you to write code if you reach the limits of what the user interface can do for you. Since this is Popfly, you can still save, share, and embed your creations everywhere from your blog to your Facebook page to your Windows Vista Sidebar.

We’re not forgetting mashups either. We revamped the interface for embedding mashups in other web pages, improved performance and caching, updated the Twitter block, and even created a nice World of Warcraft™ mashup that you can add to your Facebook page.

On Saturday May 3 -- that's a week from today -- members of the Popfly team will be at O'Reilly's Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA.

If you remember last year's Maker Faire, we did two things: we debuted Popfly and we set up shop and painted rubber ducks. Both were obviously important -- historic, in fact -- events, so this year we will be showing more new stuff and we'll have more duck painting. So come on by and visit.