Tuesday, August 25. 2009

Microsoft's Popfly Shuts Down

Like much of the rest of the world I didn't realize the shutdown occurred yesterday. But I noticed today. I was reviewing next week's lesson for my students where I reference the customization power of both Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft's Popfly. That's where I found the notice that it was no longer available. A more complete explanation was made on July 16 on the Popfly blog.

Pipes and Popfly are visual development tools aimed, for the most part, at non-programmers.

I'm pleased Yahoo Pipes is still with us. But, the fact that Popfly never made it out of beta gives me pause. Why did Popfly not make it? More broadly, why are these very powerful visual modeling tools not more popular? I know that Safe's Workbench, the first one of these I ever saw, IS well used within its user base. (I even used it fairly effectively as a complete newbie at the FME User Conference.) I wonder about ESRI's ModelBuilder. I like to think it's used, but don't hear much about it or about people sharing models.

Are these types of metaphors just not that useful? Is there really no audience for programming between casual or heavy duty that would use such interfaces? Are they too complex to use?

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft, Yahoo at 10:52 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Bing Maps via WMS

Jeff Harrison at The Carbon Project let me know about a new beta offering from On Terra Systems that makes Bing Maps data available via a WMS. You can join the beta and test it out for free.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft, Standards at 08:40 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |