Microsoft Popfly (internally codenamed ''Springfield'') was a Website that allowed users to create web pages, program snippets, and

mashup Mashup may refer to: * Mashup (culture), the rearrangement of spliced parts of musical pieces as part of a subculture * Mashup (education), combining various forms of data and media by a teacher or student in an instructional setting * Mashup (mus ...

s using the

Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...

rich web applications runtime and the set of online tools provided. It was discontinued on August 24, 2009.

Tools

The Popfly included four tools based on

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...

technology, which are described as follows.

Game Creator

The Game Creator was a tool that allowed you to create your own game or extend a game already built. It could be exported to

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

, or be used as a Windows Live Gadget.

Mashup Creator

The Mashup Creator was a tool that let users fit together pre-built blocks in order to mash together different web services and visualization tools. For example, a user could join together photo and map blocks in order to get a geotagged map of pictures on a topic of their choice. An advanced view for blocks allowed users to modify the code of the block in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, as well as giving users flexibility in designing the programs. Additional

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

code could also be added to the mashups. A feature similar to

IntelliSense Intelligent code completion is a context-aware code completion feature in some programming environments that speeds up the process of coding applications by reducing typos and other common mistakes. Attempts at this are usually done through auto-c ...

, with

autocompletion Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the tab ...

of HTML code, was available as well. The Mashup Creator also provided a preview function, with live preview in the background as users link blocks. Tutorials were available, and error notices were given to users when incompatible data was sent between blocks.

Web Creator

The Web Creator was a tool for creating Web pages. The user interface layout was similar to the

ribbon A ribbon or riband is a thin band of material, typically cloth but also plastic or sometimes metal, used primarily as decorative binding and tying. Cloth ribbons are made of natural materials such as silk, cotton, and jute and of synthetic mater ...

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

for Office 2007. Web pages were created without HTML coding, and could be customized by choosing predefined themes, styles, and color schemes. Users could embed their shared mashups in the Web page. Completed Web pages could also be saved in each user's Popfly space.

Popfly Space

Completed mashups and Web pages were stored on Popfly Space (100 MB maximum per user), where users also received a customizable profile page and other social networking features. Public projects could be shared, rated, or "ripped" by other users. Popfly allowed users to download mashups as gadgets for Windows Sidebar or embed them into Windows Live Spaces, with some support for other blog service providers. Another feature of Popfly Space was the Popfly Explorer plug-in for

Visual Studio Express Microsoft Visual Studio Express is a set of integrated development environments (IDEs) that Microsoft developed and released free of charge. They are function-limited version of the non-free Visual Studio and require mandatory registration. Exp ...

. Users could utilize Visual Studio Express (Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions or higher required) to download the mashups and modify the coding, as well as perform actions such as uploading, sharing, ripping, and rating the mashups.

Shutdown

On July 16, 2009, the Popfly team announced that the Popfly service would be discontinued on August 24, 2009. All sites, references, and resources of popfly were taken down, and this product is considered defunct.Popfly Team
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External links

Review of Popfly (PC Magazine)Adam Nathan and John Montgomery: Popfly - Now Open to the General Public and New Features Announced
from creators

Adam Nathan Adam Nathan is a technical author/speaker, and currently works as a software architect at Google. Adam was the core architect of Microsoft Popfly Microsoft Popfly (internally codenamed ''Springfield'') was a Website that allowed users to c ...

and John Montgomery

References

{{Microsoft Mashup (web application hybrid) Microsoft websites Web development software Rich Internet Applications