Review of Sprout Builder

When Sprout Builder was first released in beta, this drag and drop Flash authoring widget building environment was immediately on fire. Although there was not much wrong with the original Sprout Builder, they have recently released a much more sophisticated version of their flash building services today. The new Software Development Kit in conjunction with authoring controls have seen a large amount of improvement, offering an excellent taste of the kind of extended functionality that users are now going to be able to take advantage of.

One of the new additions to the Sprout Builder service and its Software Development Kit includes full integration with Brightcove, Twitter, Seesmic and numerous other web services directly into the widgets that users create. The Software Development Kit or SDK has been slowly opening up to add additional support for as many services and developers could possibly imagine. There are also numerous additional authoring controls that are definitely worth noting the appearance of:

If you tried Sprout Builder in the past then you probably noticed that its first official launch had a few small kinks, but new improvements have cast these kinks out and turned Sprout Builder’s authoring controls into a much more fluid system.

- Page History –

Each and every page in the authoring space for a Sprout widget displays the last twenty editing actions that you took there, meaning that you can revert back, so taking bigger risks is possible without fear.

- Effects –

Elements can easily be set to flash at hover, to slide in at the loading of a page, or to perform a wide variety of other interesting effects. This is a simple enough matter that allows for authors of widgets to add some truly helpful finesse to the widgets that they create.

- Text Control –

Displaying RSS feeds has become one of the handiest possible ways to turn Sprouts into dynamic widgets. The text output in previous incarnations of the Sprouts utility was ugly and incapable of being changed but this is no longer the case. Now Sprout is a great deal more usable in terms of being a production level utility.

The launch of the Sprout Builder SDK platform has brought on a lot of extra potential. The SDK tool already packs a giant punch in terms of potential and productivity. By opening it up to outside developers, Sprout Builder is allowing outside developers to come in and greatly amplify the impact of the utility for added benefits.

The capabilities of the Software Developer Kit are growing increasingly sophisticated as time goes by, offering additional integration support at a rather consistent pace. All kinds of additional integrations will be offered in the coming months, including Seesmic integration that can handle recording videos straight to Seesmic from a Sprout rather than simply viewing videos, and Ribbit Click to Call which couldn’t be easier to utilize and has recently been taken live.

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Originally posted 2009-01-12 05:52:09. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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#1 Buildify - Review of Sprout Builder « The Sprout Blog on 02.04.09 at 3:51 pm

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