Popfly, now with more cowbell

It’s another month, which means it’s time for another Popfly update! I have to say, shipping every month or so is a blast. Getting new bits into our users’ hands this often is a fantastic feeling, but it only works if you give us feedback on what you love and hate, so keep it coming! We’ve stuffed a lot of great, new features into this release, and you can find out all about them over on our official team blog. Given that I’m a UI guy at heart, I want to highlight some of my favorite, new Ux improvements:

 Block Categories - We now categorize blocks in the mashup creator in order to help you find the content you’re looking for that much quicker. We also differentiate between Microsoft and user-created blocks, and show block ratings!

 Block Editor - The Block Editor has received a visual overhaul, and now features the same great tutorial UI and block list as the mashup creator.

 Project Details - The Project Details page has received a lovely new visual overhaul, and now lets you automatically submit cool mashups you’ve created or found to Digg and Reddit.

 New Visual Style - I spent a lot of time over the past month ripping out our old themes and replacing them with a simple, elegant white theme. The new look and feel uses a fixed width on most pages, and a fluid, 100% width on our creator pages (mashup creator, web creator, block creator). All text across the site should be perfectly legible, and everything should work beautifully on 1024x768px screen resolutions.

 Project Browsing and Searching - Find all of the newest and top-rated projects in one location! Yay, we’ve wanted this forever, and we’re excited to finally have it implemented.

 Mashup Tweaking - Want to fiddle with a mashup without having to open the creator and mess around with that experience? We now have a lightweight tweaking interface where you can adjust the properties on your mashups quickly and easily. For example, my Gamerscore mashup can be changed to show your gamercard with significantly less work.