Popfly Frequently Asked Questions

Overview

Q What is Popfly?

A Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups, and a social network of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

For more information, see the Overview Page

Q What are some specific examples of things I can do with Popfly?

A It can do a lot – here are some examples:

1. Customize and share media: Popfly makes it easy to share and customize pictures, podcasts, music, and video. You can easily build beautiful slideshows using pictures from Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, Facebook, or embed a Podcast or video player hosting videos from Soapbox or YouTube directly on your Facebook profile, Windows Live Spaces page, or any Web page.
2. Describe your online persona: Popfly enables you to customize and stitch together your online persona in one place. You can create mashups that show what you dug on Digg.com, what you are buying or selling on eBay, what Facebook events you’re attending, what your friends are doing on Twitter, game scores from Halo 3 and much more.
3. Add some fun: You can easily spice up your Web site using Popfly, say by adding customized games like Whack-a-mole or asteroids with pictures of your friends and family or create custom quizzes or polls that you can easily embed on your Web site.
4. Put it all together: You can build a custom home page, say for your school’s sports team and easily add things like team photos, a team schedule from an RSS feed, video from previous games from Soapbox or YouTube, Virtual Earth maps with directions to game locations and more, all without writing code.
5. Advanced users: Advanced users and users of Visual Studio Express can use Popfly as their free "playground" for building custom HTML, JavaScript and Silverlight applications and easily call Popfly blocks directly from code.

Q What's Microsoft's motivation for releasing Popfly?

A Popfly is another piece in our company-wide outreach in helping non-professionals build everything from Xbox games to Robotics to custom Web applications using Windows Home Server. Popfly becomes the online home for building and sharing all types of non-professional projects, from static Web pages to mashups, to game mods.

Q Is Popfly free?

A Yes, Popfly is free, but some 3rd party blocks services may require a subscription fee.

Q Can I build or share commercial applications using Popfly?

A Yes, but some blocks are restricted to non-commercial use only.

Q What problem is Popfly trying to solve?

A Popfly is designed to enable non-technical users to be able to create without code, then share creations with friends by embedding them everywhere. You shouldn’t have to write code to be able to customize services on the Web, it should be as easy as visually "snapping" together a couple of blocks. You can think of Popfly as the "YouTube for applications" where you can discover, rate, comment, and remix user-generated applications and samples.

Q Why did you call it Popfly?

A Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, October 2007 Community Tech Preview Internets Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.

Popfly Publishing

Q Where can Popfly applications be hosted?

A By clicking "Mashout" on your Projects page, you’ll get the option to share your application on your personal Web site or blog (using iframes), or on social networks like Windows Live Spaces or Facebook.

Audience and Availability

Q Who is the target audience for Popfly?

A Popfly is targeted at anyone who wants to build dynamic content without manually writing code.

Q How do I join Popfly?

A Popfly is publicly available. Simply sign in to Popfly using your Windows Live ID account.

Schedule

Q When will Popfly be out of beta?

A We have not yet set the final release date.

Partners and Extensibility

Q Can third party companies build on Popfly?

A Yes, please visit the Ecosystem page for more information.

Q Who are the partners supporting Popfly?

A There are dozens, including companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Dapper, among others.

Q Is Popfly extensible?

A Yes, users can build their own blocks. You can create your own block on the Popfly website or in Visual Studio by using Popfly Explorer.

Security

Q How is Popfly secured?

A Popfly uses multiple domains, one being a secure domain used for logging into the site and keeping your user credentials and another dedicated to hosting your applications. The application hosting domain cannot, by design, access the cookies or private information from the secure domain.

Q What if someone writes malicious or inappropriate content to Popfly?

A We have high expectations of you, but please report abuse to puff@nospam.microsoft.com (remove the nospam) immediately.

Popfly Technical Questions

Q How are blocks built?

A The code for blocks is written in JavaScript. For presentation layer blocks, you can use AJAX, DHTML, or Silverlight (XAML). Blocks have defined input and output parameters and operations (methods) that are used to connect them between other blocks. Each block also has an xml metadata file that describes what the block does. You can find built-in tutorials on how to build blocks directly in Popfly.

Q How can I create my own custom block?

A You can create blocks by selecting Create a Block from the Create Stuff menu on the Popfly web site or by creating a new Popfly Block project in Visual Studio. You will need to install Popfly Explorer to be able to create a block in Visual Web Developer. Then read the block building guide which includes the source code for several blocks. Or you can just rip an existing block to see how others have done it.

Q How do I create custom blocks from data services that require passwords or developer keys?

A Because of the potential for abuse, we do not allow users to create custom blocks that require passwords or developer keys. If you have a secure data service you want implemented as a block, contact us at wepopfly@nospam.microsoft.com (remove the nospam).

Q Can I create server-side applications using ASP.NET with Popfly?

A No, Popfly applications run on the client Web browser and are not designed for server-side processing. For server-side applications, you can use an ASP.NET hosting company.

Q As a Visual Studio user, can I deploy a Windows ClickOnce application or a XBAP application using Popfly?

A Not at this time, we are investigating adding support for this scenario in the future. For now, users can only share the source code for projects using Popfly Explorer.

Q As a Visual Web Developer user, can I deploy a client-only Web application using Popfly?

A Yes, you can easily do this by creating a Popfly Web Site project, which becomes available in Visual Studio after you installed Popfly Explorer.

Q How can I build a custom, client-only, Web application written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript or Silverlight using Popfly?

A You can create a single web page on the Popfly Website when you go to the Popfly Mashup Creator and select Add Custom HTML and simply copy and paste your code into the designer window. You can create an entire web site by creating a Popfly Web Site project which becomes available in Visual Web Developer after you installed Popfly Explorer.

Q Does Popfly Explorer support source control, branching and versions?

A No, we don’t want to replace the many existing source control tools available today. In the future we will add support to migrate your Popfly Visual Studio projects to CodePlex, which does offer source control functionality.

Q Do you support Silverlight 2.0 code?

A Not at this time, but we are investigating adding Silverlight 2.0 support .

Q Can I use 3rd party JavaScript or AJAX libraries for my projects using Popfly?

A Yes, so long as the libraries do not use server-side code and that the library license does not violate the Terms of Use.

Q Can I create multiple pages using the Popfly Page Designer?

A Yes, you can create a web site by creating a Popfly Web Site project in Visual Web Developer, which becomes available after you install Popfly Explorer.

Q Can I upload resource files like photos, videos, code snippets, etc to Popfly?

A Not at this time.

Q Does the Mashup Designer have any built-in support for any Ajax Libraries?

A Yes, the Mashup Designer has built-in support for the ASP.NET AJAX client library that can be used both in custom blocks and in mashups.

Q Does Popfly have any debugging support?

A Popfly Explorer provides users with debugging support from within Visual Web Developer for block and Popfly Web Site creators. Mashup creators can view a console as your mashup is making network calls, but that is about the extent of it today.

Q How do you handle cross-domain calls from JavaScript?

A We use a custom JavaScript class named environment which abstracts the cross-domain calls. It exposes two methods for retrieving data: getXml(url) and getText(url).

Q Is there a way for me to capture and store data from my application, say by creating a "voting" application that lets people vote on choices?

A Yes, Popfly includes a very rudimentary data storage mechanism that provides the equivalent of including anonymous comments for your content. You can use this programmatically by calling environment.loadAnonymousData() and environment.addAnonymousData(). We are working to provide blocks for more robust data services from 3rd party data storage providers in the future.