Live Blog: Graphing Social Patterns, Day 3, FB Apps with ASP.NET, Silverlight, and Popfly
I’ll be really thin here, splitting attention between session and some code. Also, it’s more demo based, so this is largely my comments and inferences rather than Dan’s talk.
Aiming to enable non-developers with Popfly.
Users are the stars. The “best” users should be treated like rockstars; get to know them and cater to them.
Embrace self-expression. Be personal.
Entertain. Evidently people want to earn points to buy virtual poop (example from a session I missed yesterday)
For devs: Free, client-side file hosting, works with open source AJAX. You can fully control the code.
The general interface is a node-based graph where you connect outputs to inputs; for my Anim/VFX friends, it’s like Shake but with a white background and nodes look like spinny cubes. Ooo. ;p
You connect blocks and can see the results interactively. Good iterative development workflow.
It does dynamic resizing, so making it very small or very big is straightforward.
Building a block for it is pretty straihgtforward; you can clone others as a start, or start from scratch. It’s just javascript underneath.
Also makes it easy for users to skin or mash things. Great engagement.
He shows you can use scriptaculous and, off-hand, says “it’s an open-source library used on Apple.com” … almost like a “see, it’s not part of our empire, really”
All built on free frameworks (silverlight, et al) so cross-platform, cross-browser compatible.
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