Tutorial on creating new Blocks needs a refresh
Targeting Popfly towards non-developers is an extremely great idea. People only using the applications created by others, when given the chance to do something themselves, makes them feel empowered and great!
Having said that, they also have a lot of ideas which have tremedous potential. To get their ideas into real life solutions, we really need to work on the tutorial to create Blocks.
It is extremely abstract, and vague. Maybe a 30-60 minute video tutorial will really help users to better understand the developement process of a Block, and soon, we will see a lot more interesting and useful Blocks on the site.
Just my 2 cents.
~R
Thats great to know.
Any plans on having a more interactive/engaging learning experience? Like video demos, webcasts, sample projects with detailed information on how to build them?
Basically, making it as easy as possible for non-developers to gain interest, feel comfortable, and enjoy exploring new opportunities.
Also, this thing hasnt gained as much ground yet, so it would be great to see MSFT lead in this direction.
We want to create a great learning experience in Popfly - tutorials, videos, and detailed documentation such as the block building guide are all things that we want to have accessible to new programmers. What we have right now is a start... 
That being said, I am really interested in what you would find to be an interesting tutorial. How do you find the lengths of the current tutorials? The difficulty level? What blocks or types of mashups do you think are the most interesting? So far I've heard feedback that a Facebook tutorial is needed/wanted, so I plan on working on that soon!
Interesting tutorials are definitely webcasts and demo videos. I can talk for a lot of my friends and myself, that seeing and learning is the easiest, and you grasp the most. I have taken some of the Hands On Labs classes on ASP.NET and other technologies from Microsoft in the past. But just reading from a set of instructions, logging on to a remote server, and doing the steps isnt really a great learning experience. Besides, its a lot more time consuming.
The current start on building blocks is just like the hands on labs. Its dry, and doesnt create as much interest, and has a steep learning curve. As opposed to the video for building mashups - thats simply cool. I was able to learn so much, in 15 minutes, that I could start demoing the power of Popfly to my friends in 15 minutes!
I'll give u a small example. I actually thought of making a small block thats basically a dictionary lookup, and my source was MSN Encarta. It would have been fairly simple, as I noticed that looking up a word on MSN Encarta, is simply calling the following URL: http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/WORD.html, where you replace WORD with the word you are actually looking the meaning for.
I faced a lot of complexities to create it. I read the tutorial and needed to understand the XML structure of the XML file defining the class and other web attributes. What I would love to see are Wizards. Create wizards for Visual Studio and the online Block designers that take inputs such as Class name, Webservice URL, image URL, logo/icon URLs, function names etc, and output the XML files and maybe even a skeleton of the .js files. That ways, its more like fill in the blanks, which is easier than writing a complete essay, for a non-developer.
Also, useful pointers to JavaScript functions and librarys would be great. You could even go a step further and explain some programming in JavaScript to further enhance the experience. It should be a "one stop shop" for all Popfly needs. That would really make it powerful. My friends in Electrical Engineering, understand programming logic, as they program in Assembly, low level C etc, but this scripting worlds is tough to grasp. Even for experienced developers, once they are used to methodical, structured, tightly coupled programming languages, shifting to the scripting paradigm is tough. We should assist them too in best ways possible.
I know I put forth too many ideas, and maybe not well described, but I think I made my point a little better understood. 15-30 minute webcasts are great resources, and one can really learn more effectively, faster and reproduce better. Also, enabling Wizards for development would be great!
Thanks for hearing 
For an Alpha, and first real application I've seen in Silverlight, You Guys Rock!
