Okay - it's late, but I just spotted my invite to Microsoft's PopFly mashup tool in alpha... anyone else been playing?
The interface suggests I have invites - but I don't? I assume blogging about the tool is ok, similarly posting screenshots, but I'm going to hold off for a bit*, at least until I get to knock up a demo or two (things are a little unstable on my machine at the mo ;-)
In the meantime, here are a couple of youTube movies - a 3 minute video overview of Popfly and a longer twenty minute video demo of Popfly:
Suffice to say - the app is web based - though you do have to install the Silverlight beta. This seemed to install okay for Firefox on OS/X, Macbook Pro (and also onto XP Pro under Parallels - although Parallels doesn't offer 3D support so I don't know how many of the graphical UI blocks in Popfly will work?).
* Okay - maybe a couple of quick comments about the app: the idea is much like Pipes - wire together functional/process blocks and UI blocks, setting internal parameters where necessary. There are a few functional/computational blocks - like regular expressions - which means you can get your hands a little dirty if you want to/have to. Of the third party apps, Yahoo had quite a few tools in the 'official' blocks toolbar (which also has space for user created blocks) but of Google support, there was no sign... Hmmm... ;-) [It seems TechCrunch noticed this too:-)]
With the Scratch educational programming'n'animation tool coming on to the scene last week, and the Yahoo Pipes web feed mashup tool three months or so ago, there's now quite a spectrum of drag'n'drop, plug'n'play mashup editors out there in the wild...
... not to mention point'n'click screenscrapers like Dapper and intuitive online movie editors like Scenemaker (which lets you tag clipped segments within youTube - and other online video sites - movies) and multimedia players like Splashcast for compiling multimedia assets in 'shows' and 'channels' that you can publish to your own site.
And here's one from the BBC that sneaked out quietly - find / listen / label - annotatable audio (more info here):
This is a tool for adding notes to radio programmes. You can split the programme into smaller sections, called snippets, and then add a Label.Radio programmes can be split into snippets, like chapters. These may be associated with articles in the programme, like interviews, or just mark out interesting bits. The purpose of dividing the programmes like this is to make it easier for everyone to Find and Listen to specific parts of the programme.
So there you go, a few more tools to add to the list that show how ICT education is getting left behind...
...and in case you haven't noticed, it's not just mutterings about ICT "education" that are getting louder - if you haven't already seen it, you could do a lot worse than taking 40 minutes out to listen to Sir Ken Robinson asking: Do schools kill creativity?.
If you think the answer is "yes", then what are you gonna do about it?
Posted by ajh59 at May 26, 2007 01:34 AM