What is activeden? To say it short: on activeden your can sell you Flash Apps.

To me it sounds quite nice, I can develop some stuff at home and can easily sell it on a platform and get money for it. So I told to myself: “Go for it and try it out.”

I started to browse a little bit on the activeden platform, looked at the apps already there and directly started to create an account. As a seller you have to pass a test after the registration process, it should make sure that you have the rules of the platform in mind, understand the review process and understand the copyright stuff. It took some time to pass the test, but you can try it as often as you want.

What should I sell? I discovered a very useful site, where the people behind the project tell you what they need and what they don’t need. Among other things it says that they need Flash games. Ok, I’m developing Flash games at work, so that should be no problem. With that in mind I started to write my own game, it should be called ‘Memory Music’ and is similar to a normal memory game, but you have to find a pair of the same sound snippets instead of images.

While I was developing, I often had to reduce the concept, because the development shouldn’t take too much time. So I ended up with around 120 hours of work. It’s still too much but I wanted to make the little game intuitive and with a nice UI.

I uploaded all files and my nice and long documentation and waited for the release of my little game. The game was rejected two time, but after changing some stuff I get it through. And that’s it: Music Memory

Now the interesting part started for me. How much money can I get with it?

The first week I sold it 4 times, the second week 2 times an in the rest of the month 2 times, so I’m now at 8 sold items that makes 32$ for me.

For me it’s a test if the platform is useful for me. I haven’t needed anything for building the game, I have a notebook, licenses for Flash, FlashBuilder and Photoshop and did it after my work at home.

BUT,

there are also a few drawbacks

Documentation: I had to comment all methods and classes and write an extra Documentation. That’s for sure is ok for the buyers, but it takes a lot of time. In normal projects (e.g. freelance projects) that time will be much less.

Code: The project had to be a Flash (IDE) project – a *.fla  file which will start the hole game . If you want to deploy it as a FlashBuilder project (only FlashBuilder and FlashSDK) you have to put it into a specific category with nearly nothing in it. And in addition you have to make an extra preview version.

Rights: You give all your rights exclusively to the platform and can’t sell it elsewhere.

Price: You have no influence about the price, it will be set from the activeden stuff.

Income: It will start with a rate of 50%, that means for every item you sell you will get only the half of the money (in my case the game costs 8$ and I get only 4$). This will increase after a certain amount of sold items.

As summary for now, it’s a good platform if you do a lot of projects where you can extract some stuff, with only a little amount of additional work, and resell it on activeden. If you have a lot of items on your portfolio, you get more visits and will sell more stuff. You can also sell graphics, videos, javascript and so on in the envato marketplaces (the company behind activeden). It accumulates than to one account. But if you develop only for activeden, it’s not worth the time I think, because you will probably get more money if you will do freelance projects or some other stuff. And it’s for the money only – if you want to do it for fun or fame then please do it as an open source project.

I’m not done with my test yet, because I actually didn’t any advertising or something like this. That’s the next test because you also get money if someone registers over your referral link and buys something later. I will keep you up to date

What is it? It’s a smart little storage server — designed for 24/7-operation in your living room. Small, stainless steel and up to 5 TB capacity. Here are the facts:

And a few images

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simplicity-Architect

I searched a long time for a good Safari browser extension for blacklisting some of the most time-wasting sites. In my daily work a have to do a lot with facebook and facebook games, its very cool but I have to avoid too much procrastination. With WasteNoTime I found a good solution.

With this extension you can set white- or blacklists for sites and define a time how long you can visit the blocked sites today. So you can have a look on your favorite facebook game, but after your defined time runs out, the game will be closed and a site opens up which says “shouldn’t you been working” or something like this. Of course you can also define your own ‘Block Page’.

Try it out. Its free and I think its for Safari only, but maybe there are some similar AddOns for Firefox or Chrome.

The second try to restart this blog was again in German and than about Flash, Flex and the Technologies around that. But after my third post I stuck again, because I didn’t focused enough on this blog to keep it running.

Finally this will now be the last try to run a blog. This time in English, because I currently work at wooga  and the main language spoken there is English. With writing a blog in English I try to improve my English, and of course a lot more people can read the blog now. So if the English is not perfect, no matter I’ m working on that. The content of this blog will not be a specific one. It’s all about technology, development, productivity and so on.