Re: Should You Be Allowed To ReSell Your Backupify Account On eBay?
In response to a tweet posted by @Backupify:
Someone is reselling Backupify accounts on Ebay. Should we allow it to continue? http://bit.ly/afHpGj
That is an interesting conundrum. My answer is No. Before I get to the why, here are a few Pros I considered.
The positive side of allowing reselling
First: many non-techie people use eBay as a discovery device. Much like randomly moving through iTunes to find and buy new music, many of my family members and friends found online services through browsing on eBay.
Second: from experience with my non-techie friends and family who regularly use eBay, I expect many of them would say the same thing: if they found out about the service on eBay, and it interested them, they’d ask their techie friends about it. Meaning, they would get directed to the service’s website long before buying it on eBay.
And one aside: most experienced eBay users would completely dismiss this offer (as far as buying it on eBay anyhow) because the eBay user has a reputation of 0.
Those were the only positive points I could come up with.
Aside from the obvious negatives to allowing reselling,
the passionate NO! comes from my views as a Backupify customer. To see someone so blatantly abusing the generous offer that Backupify gave to its first set of customers, greatly disgusts me. I want to smack this person for their greed. To let it continue means Backupify devalues its own services. Also, knowing the [techie] friends I would refer to this service, if they saw this on eBay, it would lower their opinion of the company greatly. While eBay is a great discovery device for the non-technical crowd, right now I’m going to guess that their main customer base is tech-capable. You have to have some degree of understanding of the web to be using Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Gmail and others; you have to have enough personal data invested in them to motivate yourself to protect that data by backing it up.
In summary, the emphatic NO comes from my personal concern that it could cause future reputation damage to a company I am just beginning to enjoy.
Progress with Flex 3
Somewhat irrelevant news: Please excuse my absence. I decided to take a long break, since I experienced some complications and my son was delivered a month earlier than he was due. This post was scheduled for editing and posting on March 26.
With a magic little button, I managed to connect to the FMS. Then I bit off more than I could chew with a larger set of UI components. Now, with a little data binding and a lot of ActionScript 3, I have a basic broadcaster built. I’ve read more documentation and books on ActionScript 3, Flex 3 and Flash Media Server than I care to admit, but so far I have absorbed and applied everything I have read. Building my first RIA has been every bit of fun and frustration as I expected, only on a much slower timeline than I had hoped. For every 1 hour I expected to work on a task, I have actually worked 4.
Many of the things I built came from old sample projects. I translated them from Flash to Flex, then from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3. You can download my sample projects, supply your own RTMP address and see instant results:
- playback-stream.zip
- make-connection.zip
- nice-ui.zip
- data-binding.zip
I hope these examples help you learn Flex faster than I did.
Flex Resources and Help
The best resources I found, in a variety of media:
Books
These were the top 3 books recommended over and over again by the Usenet groups I follow.
- Programming Flex 3: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex [link]
- Essential ActionScript 3.0 [link]
- Programming Flash Communication Server [link]
Web
Documentation
If you have a project already in mind and understand object oriented code, you may want to jump right in with your idea.
- Flex 3 docs [html | pdf]
- ActionScript 3 docs [html | pdf]
- Flash Media Server 3 docs [html | pdf]
- Flash Media Server 3.5 docs [html | pdf]
Video Tutorials
While Lynda.com has been a great resource for learning Flex, these free video tutorials have proven just as handy:
- Learn Flex in a Week [video tutorials]
- Flash 411: Getting your video questions answered [video tutorials]
Sample Apps
Sometimes the best way to learn a new concept is to just jump right in and get your hands dirty. These sample applications are small, simple and great examples of the potential behind RIAs. Although the first one is created in Flash, it can be done in Flex, too.
- Building a Simple Live Video Broadcaster and Receiver [sample app]*
- Creating a Simple RIA [sample app]
* As someone new to Flex, I thought the broadcaster/receiver idea would have been really useful as a sample Flex project, so I rebuilt this one in Flex and translated it from ActionScript 2 into ActionScript 3. I’ll make the .zip file available for download in the next post.
People
For those really complex questions that can’t be answered by a definition in the documentation or isn’t covered in the books, you can connect to a pool of professionals via e-mail:
A List Apart – The Survey, 2008
Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.
The second annual survey by A List Apart seeks information about the people behind the scenes: the folks who make a website “go” (that’s you). Last year nearly 33,000 respondents gave us a peek into what working in the world of web is like – from obvious findings (it’s a male-dominated field) to not-so-obvious extrapolations (compared to IT and other computer-related fields, web workers make squat!) all of which you can read, but please take this year’s survey first.
Thursday Finds
Something Gorgeous
I have trouble creating beautiful designs, but no trouble identifying them. For anyone else in this same boat, here are some tools and ideas to help create respectable work, design already included:
- Obsidian Dawn: beautiful PhotoShop brushes, to add a graceful artistic element to any print or web work.
- Mad Mimi: prettier e-mail campaigns, with a nice UI to boot.
- Wufoo: easy to use, easy to build forms, displayed in style.
