MS Popfly

Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts:

1. Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.

2. Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

You need to register for this right now, and though I have not been able to access it yet, this seems to be a way that MS hopes to popularize SilverLight

Google talk gadget in Flash

The Carrs have been working on this for a while and they have finally released it. Here's the blog post that gives you the details. Also if you're logged in you'll see the embedded version of the gadget below...

Flash support for Wii

Been a long time since I have any Flash related posts, but here's something interesting. Aral points to the Wii Browser (Opera) which has support for the Flash 7 player. So potentially you can write games in Flash that will run on Wii. Cool...

Microsoft vs Adobe

JD is keeping a tab of what the blogosphere has to say about Microsoft's Expression Suite launch.

I played around a bit with the Community Technology Preview of the expression suite which I'd downloaded a few months ago and used it to create a few designs. The Graphic Designer module was interesting while the Web Designer module seemed very similar to Dreamweaver and quite good. But the interactive designer/blend/sparkle was the odd boy of the lot. It borrowed a lot from Flash, but you had to do things differently to get it working. And although I have been using Flash for over 10 years, using MS Blend/Sparkle/ID was not quite straight forward as Mano would make you believe in his presentations. As a result I never got around the learning curve, and since my job as an interaction designer is not tied to the tool, I don't think I would really invest much time in it. At least, not now.

If there is a following in the future, it would possibly go up the same curve that Flash did in its early days, but maybe a bit slower as there is not that much of a 'disruptiveness' associated with the product.

Interestingly of the three, Blend is the only product that was designed and developed in-house, the other two were acquired. One more observation I had about the Expression Suite (at least the CTP) was that it did not gel together as one suite of applications, but more like a hotch-potch.

I'm sure things will improve in the future, and it is always good to have more than one option when it comes to tools to work with...