Wiennat

A week ago before I decided to register for MashCampBangkok, I saw many people entered Yahoo! Pipe as their topic. So I would enter something different so I proposed Popfly.

Popfly is a website that allows user to create mashup, webpage and game using Silverlight and online toolkit that Microsoft provides. For mashup creaton, which is the only part I've tried, various blocks are provided to help developers. With drag and drop, I can create a simple mashup which receive a search term from user and then look for photo from Flickr, Live Image Search, Yahoo Image Search and then show them in nice flying carousel in 5 minutes. Many people say Popfly is Microsoft's Yahoo Pipe clone. But Jon Udell doesn't think so. He thought they are complimentor. They can be used altogether to create an interesting mashup.

With Jon Udell's comparison, I decided to create a mashup with Pipe and Popfly. I decided to use Pipe to aggregate and to process data. Then let Popfly consumes the output and render it to user. With little knowledge in Pipe, it took me 30-40 minutes to create a small pipe which process the result from Twitter Search API. I used Popfly since it beta and still remember how easy to create a mashup with it. So I thought I could do it in no time but I was wrong. And that's why Popfly sucks.

After I used Popfly to create the mashup for 4 hours directly, I can summarize why Popfly sucks into these.

1. Poorly design UI.

My computer screen resolution is 1024*768. It may sounds like too small for developer. But most of internet users out there are using this resolution. And with this resolution, Popfly mashup designer has little space left.

About 800*650 pixels left for designer. Only few blocks put into it and it is filled. They can make the header smaller. Space is also wasted by that big-and-ugly mode switcher. It should be move away to somewhere else, make it smallerm, floatable or collapsible are more pleasure.

Compare this with Yahoo Pipe, I can use Pipe with more convenient. Even I add an irrelevant Item Builder module, it still has some space left on the right side.

Secondly, toolbox scrollbar contains a bug. I don't know why they cannot reproduce this. How can I use Popfly with this toolbox? I have toggle the other tab to make scroll bar behave correctly every time I want to find something in Tools tab.

Thirdly, what's the purpose of the help sidebar on the right? I read it once and forget about it forever. Such a useless sidebar. At least the right sidebar can be used to provide some information or property of the block which cursor is hovering on. It'd be more useful if it is collapsible.

2. Less useful block

Popfly has a bunch of prebuilt block to start with. Some are useful, some are not so useful. But there is no support for JSON, which is a must. I couldn't consume my data from Pipe because I intended to export JSON from it and Popfly cannot consume it directly. However, it allows user to create a custom block called Mashup block. I can use it to consume my Pipe anyway. But that leads to another reason why Popfly sucks.

3. Steep learning curve and has many requirement.

To begin with Pipe, I need only few understanding of mashup. And then try to guess how each module work by its name and its parameter. For Popfly, I need to understand XML, JavaScript, Popfly's Block metadata system. Furthermore, I had to install Visual Web Developer in order to know that I can't debug my Mashup. This is may be my fault partly. In fact, I read the document thoroughly many times to understand how to create my block but I still couldn't make it works. Popfly requires Silverlight but Pipe can do it with AJAX. So Yahoo Pipe is obviously better; fair and simple.

4. No easy way to create a block

To create a block in Popfly, input and output must be specified in Block metadata, which is XML. Also, it must be specified as a class in Javascript too. Why Popfly doesn't just let me create a class and automatically recognizes the class metadata?

At the end, after I tried everything for 4 hours, I couldn't make my Popfly works. And that's why I say it sucks. So I still have to wait for another