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Popfly, Microsoft's first Silverlight application, is a visual development tool for creating mashups without writing any code.
Dan Fernandez, lead product manager in Microsoft's developer division, wants Popfly to reach what he calls "the MySpace generation" who want cutting edge web gadgets without cutting edge coding.
"We have Visual Studio Express and we actually have had 14 million downloads since November 2005. To give you an idea, World Of Warcraft, a very popular game, has eight million users worldwide. So we have huge download numbers, especially for tools.
Quote:
"But one of the things we found is a lot of people that tried it weren't programmers, they had never written a line of code and they thought it was hard. This is the MySpace generation. They're writing markup, they understand tags, they're not necessarily writing their own JavaScript but they're taking JavaScript and tweaking it - it's the copy/paste world. This is our tool for the people that want to create stuff; they don't necessarily know how to write the first line of code but they want to create something and have it running within a couple of minutes, with no code."
You can also add your own HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
To mash two services together, you drag the appropriate blocks onto the design service, drag lines between the nodes on each block to connect them, choose the operation you want to use and get a live preview on the design surface. The blocks have what Fernandez calls "smart defaults" so a block for photos will look for an image URL automatically. You can see a real time preview even without having an API key for the service you're working with if the service allows demos. While working on the blocks the preview displays in a transparent layer in the background.