Sriram Krishnan™ Live

Not too long ago, I received a Popfly alfa invite from my namesake working at the Popfly team based at Redmond, Virginia. (Special thanks!) I had the time to play around with it the past few days. I am going to focus on the nitty gritty aspects of my experience before moving on to my general feelings about this fly.

Signing up process took slightly longer than expected. I had to register or associate my gmail address with Windows Live ID before I could login to Popfly. I vaguely remember not encountering any holdup in registration of an account after this process, so semi thumbs up to this. =)

Next up, first impressions about the homepage. In essence, you will come across three different ‘partitions’ or ‘parts’, whatever tickles your fancy. There are, from left to right, ‘Creating a web page’, ‘Create a mashup’ and ‘Join the community’. Below these, you have a stream of the community’s most popular mashups. So yes, it’s easy to navigate and use. Thumbs up so far.

Let’s create a web page then. Clicking this link takes you to a page where you have a ‘Page editor’ and ‘Page layout’ embedded within the site. Imagine a mini Microsoft Word application within your website. Now imagine if this word application was minimised to 1/3 or 1/4 the size, but you still had the scroll bar on the sides to scroll all the way down. So basically, you have one scroll bar for the main website and another scroll bar for this minimised page editor. Within this page editor, you have another mini scroll bar for the content of the main block within the page editor. My first impressions were that this template was too small to work with and there were too many scroll bars. In order to play around with the design of my site, I wanted an overall picture of the layout of my site and I think this is where this alfa version could improve on. It would be neat to have a wordpress-like “Post preview” option of “Site preview” below the page editor so that we get a better idea of the general locations of each block within the page. The page editor/style scroll bar can be removed so that the main scroll bar of the site is enough to navigate the user to different regions of the site template. A drag and drop feature would certainly add a touch of interactivity and make the whole process more lively.

On to the mashups. On the left, you have a list of applications that you can use to mash with each other and the central screen is dominated by the free space where you can drag and drop each application. The whole layout looks good and simple. Having said that, I think the application blocks are quite huge and takes up alot of space. Again, either the blocks could be made smaller or the main central space made bigger. I would prefer the former. You also can’t (intuitively!) add as many application blocks as you want because apparently, “Sorry, you cannot add this block unless you delete the X block. Both of them want to control the entire display, but only one can at a time.”. Again, the second scroll bar within the made page could be taken out. Newer applications such as Jaiku and Dopplr are not featured as yet but I suspect users can create this themselves. The drag and drop feature is class, but sluggish.

Meeting other users is a simple procedure. You can sort by username or ratings. It would also be nice to sort by number of shared projects to get a better idea how many geeks are out there and a sort by number of mashups per application to get an idea on what’s hot or not.

General impressions

The learning curve for creating content and applications is tremendously reduced. One doesn’t have to have learn how to code to actually build a site or an application. The mashups created can be embedded and published into the your blog.

I am not that particularly impressed with Silverlight, yet. It’s supposed to outdo Flash but I detected signs of sluggishness. Navigation was pretty slow and the minimising/maximising the various menus felt draggy at times.

On the whole, Microsoft is lucky that they’re calling this their alfa version which means they have room to err. On one hand, I think Popfly would considerably reduce the amount of time people take to create sites and applications, but on the other hand, I think Silverlight has a long way to go before matching Flash.

(Pictures courtesy of Kok Chiann)