This afternoon, we’re going to deploy something that several folks at Popfly HQ have been hard at work on - a brand new game engine!  This new game engine gives Popfly games vastly-improved performance.  Games should run much, much smoother, and you’ll be able to create games with many more actors and behaviors than ever before.  For an example of these improvements, check out this game:

With the old game engine:

http://www.popfly.com/users/andersbe/Lots%20O%20Peas.content?SL2=false

With the new game engine:

http://www.popfly.com/users/andersbe/Lots%20O%20Peas.content

(NOTE: You’ll only see the improvements after the update goes live, so don’t bother clicking this link until around 4 PM today.)

The improved game engine exploits Silverlight 2 technology, whereas the previous one ran on Silverlight 1.

Compatibility:

We did extensive testing to make sure that existing games would continue to work with the new engine.  However, the performance increases cause a small number of games to behave differently.  When the update goes live this afternoon, you’ll probably want to play your games and see if there are any adjustments you want to make to give your fans an optimal experience.

We look forward to seeing what creative things you’ll do with the power of the new game engine!

As September is winding down, we’ve got some site enhancements that are now live for you:

1. Enhanced News Feeds

Now you can see when people win badges, leave comments on projects, get high scores, and more.

2. The Super Winner Badge

Get this by winning 100 different games.

3. See What's Ripped From What

4. See Your Pending Friend Requests on your Profile Page

Enjoy!

It’s a great time to come back to Popfly and check out all the improvements!  Here are some features we just released as part of the Game Creator Beta:

Features for everyone:

New profile pages, with easier ways to view people’s projects, friends, recent activity, and more
View anyone's favorite projects
Earn badges by creating compelling content, being a good game player, making friends, or just being lucky!  Learn more about badges here.
Lots of performance improvements and bug fixes

Features for game creators of all skill levels:

Undo support for actor appearance editing
Insert images and videos directly into your actor or scene
Play audio from the Web or an uploaded file without custom code
Customize actor edges with a simple drag-and-drop view
Nudge elements into their proper positions with arrow keys
Preview any scene inside the motion dialog and custom code dialog
Jump to any scene when playing a game in the Play editor

Features for advanced game authors:

New properties that can be used at runtime	Actor: Name, TypeName, VisualX, VisualY, VisualWidth, VisualHeight, Scene: Width, Height
Console in the custom code dialog
Scroll wheel & tab support in the XAML & JavaScript editor
"Current Scene" support, for more generic actors and scenes that are easier to clone

Features for game embedders:

Features for mashup authors:

New StringFormatter block
New ImageSlideShow block
Image scraping support in the RSS block

For those of us who can't afford front-row seats at the Olympics, Popfly is proud to bring a veritable decathlon of games built using the Popfly Game Creator including Archery, Boxing, Diving, Gymnastics, Long Jump, Soccer, Synchronized Swimming, Track & Field, and Weightlifting. Come visit our site and try them out.

Have you created a really cool Popfly project? If so, we want to hear from you!  Click here to send us your story and you may be featured on our site!

Summer has hit Seattle. The days are warm, the evenings pleasantly cool, and the developers are hard at work adding stuff to Popfly. What's in this release? Quite a bit, including:

• Game High Scores. Popfly games now support automatic tracking of your high scores and win/loss records. You can compare your performance among your friends and make new friends with other players. When you turn your Popfly game into a Facebook game, you get all these features (and more) among your Facebook friends.
• Alternate Block. In the mashup "tweak" view we've added the idea of alternative blocks -- blocks that can be substituted for each other since they are functionally equivalent. For example, you can now easily substitute a carousel output block for a photo tile output block since they both take the same input.
• Rating System Facelift. We gave the ratings system a facelift. Instead of giving projects a 1-5 star rating, you can now choose to become a “fan” of any project. The new system is a lot more like the system used on Digg, where you can give something a thumbs-up.
• Improved Combine Block. The old combine block could combine at most three fields from three inputs. The new combine block can take multiple blocks and combine them.
• Actor Reordering. By default, actors added to a scene are rendered on top of actors added earlier (if they overlap). Now you can reorder your actor instances at any time.
• Behavior Reordering. The order you list your behaviors can matter, and now you can reorder them at any time.
• Filter Behaviors by Scenes. Do you want an actor to behave one way in one scene, but a different way in another? You can now do this easily with scene filtering.
• More Ways to Discover Interesting Content. Looking for some popular Popfly games you haven’t played yet? Just look right here.
• Add New Scenes of Any Type. If you previously deleted your How to Play, Won, or Lost scene, you can now add them back. This is especially important now that Won and Lost scenes have significance for Popfly’s automatic record tracking.
• Automatic Asset Prefetching. If your games use supporting files (such as images, videos, and audio), we now ensure they are downloaded before the gameplay starts, resulting in a much smoother experience for your players.

For those of you who are educators, we've also added some lesson plans drawn up by Mark Frydenberg of Bentley College. These should help teachers use Popfly as a tool in high schools and introductory college courses.

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.

Popfly has been nominated for the CNET Webware 100 awards – the top 100 coolest online apps! We’ve been selected as one of the 300 finalists by CNET editors. That's a huge accomplishment, but now it’s up to you to decide which services are the Webware 100 winners by voting for your favorites.

As you can imagine, we’re pretty pleased just to be nominated, but we’d be more pleased if we actually won and to do that, we need your help: we need you to vote. They’ve made it pretty simple: just click on this link and you’ll be directed to a page where Popfly is automatically checked. You’re allowed up to three votes per person. Winners are announced on April 21.

There’s a lot of great competition, so please help Popfly win!

'Twas the day of deployment and all through the house, a few creatures were stirring, mostly our developers. We just deployed our latest build of Popfly and Popfly Explorer, so it's a good time to tell you what to expect:

Popfly Explorer (the plug-in for Visual Studio)

• Integrated block creation. You can now create, debug, and publish Popfly blocks directly from Visual Studio. This is a huge advance for our block creators since you can use the powerful Visual Studio JavaScript editor rather than the Popfly block editor. Documentation for that is here.
• Block editor IntelliSense in Popfly Explorer. With full IntelliSense for creating the XML and JavaScript, producing a block description is now easier than ever..
• Improved search. In the past, Popfly Explorer search is a bit limited; the new search UI makes it easy to find projects of different types created by different people.

Popfly

• WSDL block generation. Point Popfly at a WSDL file and it will automatically generate the stub of a block.
• Panning. Ever opened a mashup in edit view and the blocks go off the screen? Well you can now scroll left and right. This one was, as you can imagine, a big customer request.
• Developer keys in preview. Wonder why your Facebook mashups don't show your friends in preview? So did we, and so we fixed it: Popfly now uses your developer key for any given service if you have one and only use our preview keys when you don't have one.
• Mashups mash more smoothly. We’ve improved the parameter matching when you connect blocks.
• Block editor preview. Get a quick preview of changes to your block by clicking the Save and Run button within the block editor.
• Documentation. We've been a bit remiss in documenting particularly the changes to the block creation experience. Now with the integration into Visual Studio through Popfly Explorer we've updated the documentation. And check out the documentation for advanced mode in the Mashup designer

Oh, and don't miss the live-action Popfly screencast.

PC World just announced its list of the top 25 most innovative products for 2007 and Popfly is on it! This is obviously a huge award for the Popfly team -- we've spent a year working long hours to get a pretty non-traditional Microsoft product out the door and awards like this mean a lot to us. There are a lot of people we'd like to thank for their support: Somasegar, our VP for believing us, the editors at PC World for recognizing us, and especially we owe thanks to the people who have been willing to spend the time using Popfly and giving us feedback and asking questions in our forums.

Of course in the minds of a bunch of software developers, there's no better way to say thanks than by adding new features, so here are a few:

• 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?

We have a lot more in the pipeline, but if you haven't been back to Popfly in a while, give it a try.

Microsoft® Popfly™ Beta Release Notes

Microsoft® Popfly™ is a beta release right now. What that means is when the terms of use talk about the software being provided "as is," we mean it. Most other people only kind of mean it. We really, really mean it. Stuff will break. We’ll just apologize in advance. Sorry.

So what do you need to know? Here are the top things you probably want to know about our site. If you find others, feel free to visit our forums and give us as much information there as possible.

The Basics

• You need a Windows Live ID associated with an email address to create a Popfly account. You can get a Live ID at http://login.live.com.
• You need IE 6, IE 7, or Firefox 2.0. We support IE 6 and 7 (Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista) and Firefox 2 (Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X).
• You need Silverlight™. To use some of our site you’ll need Silverlight™ 1.0 from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/install.aspx.
• On Firefox, you may get a message about not being able to verify the identity of the site; it’s a minor certificate problem that we’re fixing very soon.

Popfly Mashup Creator

• You may get some strange IntelliSense behavior when you’re using the advanced view.
• Some display blocks that use Silverlight can only display images in the PNG and JPEG formats. Other formats, such as GIF, will not be displayed, and you may see an error message.

Popfly Web Editor

• We don’t let you type in your own HTML and JavaScript. If you want custom HTML and JavaScript, download Popfly Explorer and use Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express.

Popfly Embedding and Project Handling

• Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets are small so some output types (such as Virtual Earth-based mashups) won’t display well.
• You can't rename projects. If you need to, open the project, click "save as," then delete the old copy or use Popfly Explorer.

Popfly Explorer

• You’ll get an error when you try to open a project that is not supported by the SKU you are currently running Popfly Explorer in – so, for example, you can’t open VB projects in Visual C# Express (which makes sense when you think about it).
• Renaming a solution when it’s open will break the association with the version on the web site.

Last month we took the Popfly web site into beta with better gadget support, tweaking support, and some new blocks. This morning at 5AM PST at Tech Ed EMEA Somasegar (our divisional vice president) and Dan Fernandez (our marketing lead) showed off the new version of Popfly Explorer, the Visual Studio extension that enables you to save and share Visual Studio applications on the Popfly web site. Enhancements to Popfly Explorer include:

• You can create and host full web pages using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS on Popfly
• You can embed Popfly mashups into HTML pages
• It works on Visual Web Developer Express
• It works on Visual Studio 2008 (beta 2 and later) as well as Visual Studio 2005
• Lots of work on the user interface

Click here to download Popfly Explorer.

In addition to improvements to Popfly Explorer the Popfly web site has a few improvements, including:

• You can publish gadgets to the Windows Live Gadget Gallery
• Improvements to the carousel display block
• Updates to the profile editing page

In addition, we've updated the Popfly privacy statement.

Microsoft® Popfly™ Beta Release Notes

Microsoft® Popfly™ is a beta release right now. What that means is when the terms of use talk about the software being provided "as is," we mean it. Most other people only kind of mean it. We really, really mean it. Stuff will break. We’ll just apologize in advance. Sorry.

So what do you need to know? Here are the top things you probably want to know about our site. If you find others, feel free to visit our forums and give us as much information there as possible.

The Basics

• You need a Windows Live ID associated with an email address to create a Popfly account. You can get a Live ID at http://login.live.com.
• You need IE 6, IE 7, or Firefox 2.0. We support IE 6 and 7 (Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista) and Firefox 2 (Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X).
• You need Silverlight™. To use some of our site you’ll need Silverlight™ 1.0 from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/install.aspx. Don’t worry, it’s small and we’ll even check if you have it installed for you and give you a link to install it.
• On Firefox, you may get a message about not being able to verify the identity of the site; it’s a minor certificate problem that we’re fixing very soon.

Popfly Mashup Creator

• You may get some strange IntelliSense behavior in Firefox 2.0.
• We’re still working through some Silverlight-on-Mac issues.
• If you installed either the December or February WPF/E CTP, you'll need to remove it before installing Silverlight 1.0 .
• Display blocks that use Silverlight (such as Carousel or PhotoTiles) can only display images in the PNG and JPEG formats. Other formats, such as GIF, will not be displayed, and you may see an error message.

Popfly Web Editor

• We don’t let you type in your own HTML and JavaScript, but you can create a mashup with custom HTML and JavaScript then embed it in the page. If you want custom HTML and JavaScript, you can use the Custom HTML view from the Mashup creator.
• It’s a little wonky in Firefox 2.0.

Popfly Space

• Our support for Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets is still developing – the sizes of the gadgets in particular will probably come out wrong.
• You can't rename projects. If you need to, open the project, click "save as," then delete the old copy.

Popfly Projects

• Our support for Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets is still developing – the sizes of the gadgets in particular will probably come out wrong.
• You can’t rename projects. If you need to, open the project, click "save as," then delete the old copy.

Popfly Explorer

• Popfly Explorer won’t work on Visual Studio 2008. You may be able to install it and it may even pretend to run, but we haven’t tested it.
• Popfly Explorer won’t work on Visual Web Developer Express 2005.
• You’ll get an error when you try to open a project that is not supported by the SKU you are currently running Popfly Explorer in – so, for example, you can’t open VB projects in Visual C# Express 2005 (which makes sense when you think about it).
• Your first login may take a while and you may need to press the sign-in button more than once.
• Popfly Explorer enables you to create, save, share, and open Visual Studio® 2005 projects onto the Popfly network. It doesn’t enable you to open Popfly projects (e.g. mashups).
• Conversely, you can’t open Visual Studio 2005 projects using Popfly without using Popfly Explorer.
• Renaming a solution when it’s open will break the association with the version on the web site.
• Yes, you can invite yourself to be your own friend. It’s weird, but self-affirming.

(cross-posted from http://www.popfly.com/Overview/ReleaseNotes.aspx)

Over the last few weeks we’ve added many features and polished the user interface. We’ve taken feedback from our alpha testers, and ironed bugs. We’re not “done,” but we’re certainly feeling good enough about the release to move from calling it alpha to beta.

In fact, we feel good enough about Popfly to remove the invitation-only restriction: as of today, all you need to get into Popfly is a Live ID. More than that, we’ve introduced many features:

• 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.