July Popfly Update

There are number of updates announced by Popfly team:

• 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.

Source- Popfly team blog

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Popfly Game Creator Alpha Goes Live!

As most of you know Microsoft launched their Popfly Game creator today. Its an online tool for creating web based games similar to the casual games you’ve probably wasted hours playing when you should have been studying/working/eating/sleeping- Now you can waste hours making the games as well

However the real reason I am writing this post is to show you some funny videos made by Microsoft Channel 10 for the popfly launch. The videos are small rip off’s of some popular games including:

• Halo
• Punchout
• Mario
• Tetris
• GTA
• Frogger
• Pong

Here’s The Halo one but check out the rest of them here: http://www.on10.net/blogs/tina/Popfly-Game-Creator/

Check out this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ben_anderson

Microsoft Ultimately Launches Silverlight 1.0

Today, Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 which may prove a big rival for Flash.

For those who dont know ,Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft today also officially partnered with novell to deliver moonlight as the silverlight implementation for linux.

Till the date,Microsoft has also released various Silverlight powered applications that include Live Station, Popfly and Tafiti.

Microsoft will also be launching other products which include Omnicom’s Media Preview TV,Major League Baseball,Halo 3 Videos on MSN ,AOL Social Mail Gadget for Vista Sidebar,World Wrestling Entertainment Player etc.For a complete list visit Silverlight Showcase.

Download Microsoft Silverlight

Watch learning Videos!

S0urce- Technoworld

Microsoft launches Popfly and integrates with Spaces

This morning, the Developer Division group within Microsoft announced the alpha version launch of an new product called Popfly.

Popfly is a tool designed to help non-programmers create mashups of content, feeds, and other Cinteresting sources and publish them for their own personal use or for the larger community to use. The tool is web-based and allows you to drag and drop “blocks” onto a working surface and connect various data sources together. For example, you can snap together a built-in Windows Live Spaces photos block of your pictures and a Silverlight photo visualizer block to provide a rich, interactive display of your Spaces photos.

One of the coolest thing about Popfly is that once you create a mashup, you can, in just a few clicks, publish it directly to your space as a gadget using the “Add to Windows Live Spaces” link.

Check out a video demonstration here.

Sign up for the waiting list here and also keep your eyes open over the next few months for an invitation from one of the Alpha users. Get ready to have some fun creating cool Spaces mashups!