Yesterday Popfly Game Creator was released (at least the alpha version 
)
It allows you to write a Silverlight-based games, without actually writing any code. Once again, just as I think about the original Popfly, it is hard for non-developers to use this tool, but it can be great to people who lack a lot of advanced knowledge about development but are related to Computer Science (such as students or hobbyists).
One problem about the interface is that it is meant to be used in large resolution monitors. All the buttons are big, and even with a 1280×800 resolution I had some difficulties using the Game Creator.
Here’s a screenshot of the game editor. I like the childish look&feel.
Dan Fernandez has written a nice introduction to this tool on his blog. Take a look at it.
Here’s an example of a template which ships with this tool. It is called Big Race.
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Vai haver um evento sobre o concurso Imagine Cup (edição 2008).
Além de um representante da Microsoft, vão falar concorrentes do IST da edição anterior, e vai haver uma sessão sobre Silverlight e Popfly.
Auditório A5 – IST-Taguspark
Quarta-Feira
28 de Novembro
15h00
No mesmo dia pelas 10 horas vai haver um evento semelhante no pólo da Alameda.
Agenda
15h00 – Imagine Cup 2008 (Vitor Santos, Microsoft Portugal)
Apresentação do maior concurso internacional para estudantes de tecnologia – O que é o Imagine Cup? Como posso participar? Quais as categorias existentes? E como decorrem?
15h45 – Team Sevric – Imagine Cup na 1ª Pessoa (João Severino e Ricardo Vieira, Instituto Superior Técnico)
Conhece um dos projectos finalistas da edição anterior do Imagine Cup. Ouve da boca de que quem já participou o que o concurso te pode proporcionar e aproveita os conselhos de quem chegou perto da vitória nacional!
16h00 – Microsoft Silverlight & Popfly (Bruno Silva, Instituto Superior Técnico)
Se o nome desta apresentação não te diz nada, ou muito pouco aproveita! Vem conhecer a nova proposta da Microsoft para a Internet do futuro. O mote é criar interfaces apelativas e funcionais.
Conto com a presença de quem estiver disponível. Apareçam!
Building Fun, Cool Applications with Popfly
Dan Fernandez
First time I tried Popfly I didn’t like it too much. But I gave it a change by learning more about it in this session.
There was a lot of people in this session, too much people actually. I had to attend to it in another room, with an bad streaming quality…
The main idea is to democratize development over the internet. Allow people with almost no programming experience to create rich content websites. Dan used a great analogy. The difference in the number of programming experts and people that doesn’t know how programming is like difference between the size of the Sun and the size of Saturn. Actually, after seeing his demonstration, I wasn’t convinced than Popfly is really a tool that can be used by every one… Is more like a toy for programmers 
In his first demo he showed how to display a bunch of Flickr photos in a carousel and in a virtual book.
He showed how mashups (small visual) can be exported to Windows Vista Side Bar, Live Spaces, Facebook, or even to an simple HTML page. These mashups are actually Silverlight applications.
He also built an popularity comparer, that with two search terms creates a comparison graphic with the number of results in a search.
Dan also showed us how to create Building Blocks, which are the components which are combined to build mashups. It uses javascript to code behaviour and XML to store metadata like the kind of input/output that the block takes, and some suggestions about compatible blocks that can be combined with our costume one.
Pretty nice, hum?
