Microsoft Popfly goes beta

October 18, 2007 at 10:02 am · Filed under RIA, Web Applications, Programming

Microsoft has moved Popfly from Alpha to Beta. What’s Popfly? It is a web-based, Silverlight environment which allows coders and non-coders alike to create and share web mash-ups (think along the lines of Yahoo Pipes), gadgets, applications and web pages.

From Microsoft’s press release:

Popfly goes public. Microsoft today announced the public beta release of Popfly, a tool built on Microsoft Silverlight, which provides a fun and easy way for anyone to build and share “mashups,” gadgets, Web pages and applications. Popfly provides anyone — even those with no programming experience — with a simple way to make creations without code and share them on social networks such as Windows Live Spaces and Facebook. Popfly enables users to do the following:

• Add some pizazz to their Facebook profile, blog or personal Web page by adding games, slide shows, “Halo® 3” stats or eBay auctions.
• Build a Web page for a club or organization, such as a soccer team page that would include a schedule, photos and videos from past games, directions to upcoming matches, and more.
• Leverage blocks from Popfly partners, such as Twitter, Facebook and Dapper, to drive site awareness and traffic.

Initially saw this mentioned in Erick Schonfield’s post on TechCrunch.

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XHTML/CSS - Get a job

July 27, 2007 at 2:22 pm · Filed under Programming, RIA, Information Architecture, Visual Design, User Interface, User Experience

Terralever is currently hiring for several positions at our Tempe, Arizona office.  Here’s the job posting that was added to our career’s section today:

Terralever is on the lookout for a passionate, creative, standards compliant front end architect. We’re not going to bore you with the regular “must know CSS, XHTML, yada, yada”.The right candidate yearns for new learning experiences and has an exquisite passion and drive to be on the bleeding edge of technological revolutions. This candidate will have validation in life through amazing work and the W3C, a pixel-perfect attention to detail, an insatiable desire to be creative, and an ownership to their work that it’s the best. And a rockin’ iPod playlist doesn’t hurt.Terralever is located on Mill Avenue in the heart of downtown Tempe, offering our employees a hip, creative atmosphere. We have a team centric work environment which allows our staff to interact with all aspects of a project. We have amazing award-winning work for national brands, but we pride ourselves more for the extraordinary group of people that make it possible.If this sounds like you and a company you’d like to work for e-mail jobs@terralever.com with your resume and some sweet samples. 

The original posting is located on the careers section on the Terralever web site along with additional job postings for the roles of Senior Interactive Designer, Flash Production Artist, Senior Interactive (Flash) Developer, Interactive Project Manager, and .NET Web Applications Developer.We’re also always looking for best-of-breed candidates in search marketing (SEO and PPC) and viral marketing.

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MIX 07 Conference

May 1, 2007 at 8:05 am · Filed under RIA, Web Applications, Events, User Experience

I was lucky enough to head up to the MIX07 Conference is Vegas thanks to some help from a good Microsoft friend, Tim Heuer. It would have been great to have made day 1, but there are a lot of good sessions Tuesday and Wednesday also. Here’s the one’s I’m looking to check out:

Tuesday
Using Windows Live Services in Your Own Web Applications
Design Rich Client Experiences with Expression Blend and WPF
PANEL DISCUSSION: Social Networking: Enabling the Two-Way Street
Creating a Domain Communication Experience on Windows Live

Wednesday
Fumbling towards AGENCY 2.0
Interactive Advertising on the Windows Media Center Platform
Building Rich, Interactive E-commerce Applications Using ASP.NET and Silverlight

I’m also hoping to run into some of our clients that are there as well as some Microsoft people I was lucky enough to work with in DPE (Developer and Platform Evangelism) during my short time there including Craig Jaris (now at IdentityMine), Darren McCormick, Forest Key, Ray Winninger, Sean Alexander, Chris Bernard and Steve Cellini.

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Microsoft: WPF/e = Silverlight

April 16, 2007 at 11:19 am · Filed under RIA, Video, User Interface, User Experience

Microsoft announced the public release name for the technology/plug-in previously known by its code name “WPF/e” (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) today as “Silverlight.” Although Microsoft has preferred that the technology not be compared with Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia) ubiquitous Flash plug-in, it’s hard not to make the comparison. Both plug-ins leverage vector based graphics and scripting languages to allow the delivery of richer-than-HTML multimedia experiences, and both have a focus on the delivery of video content.

I worked at Microsoft last year for a few months prior to returning to my post at Terralever. While there, I participated in a program in which Microsoft brought in multimedia designers to put Silverlight through its paces. They were working on a version of the plug-in that was still in development and were working without documentation. Even with those limitations, the resulting demos did show promise in the hands of the highly qualified multimedia designers.

But, who would consider Silverlight over Flash? Here’s some thoughts on Silverlight:

• For designer-developers who are more fluent in JavaScript (or AJAX) Silverlight may be easier to transition to than Flash
• For RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications) that involve communication between an HTML page and multimedia content housed within it, Silverlight may prove to be a more seamless solution as the Silverlight object is a part of the DOM
• This is a v1 product for Microsoft, who usually starts firing on all cylinders around v3, and, Microsoft seem serious about its movement into this space
• Video is the hot topic on the web right now. Flash is currently able to stream a maximum of 576 lines (per Ars Technica) whereas video encoded with Microsoft’s VC-1 codec can be streamed at 720 lines. Silverlight also handles scaling video while it is being viewed beautifully.

Silverlight’s biggest hurdle? Gaining the mind share of multimedia designers—and doing so with a PC-only development ecosystem (Microsoft Expression).

The cross-browser plug-in is currently available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox on the PC as well as Safari and Firefox on the Macintosh.

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