Suppose you’ve made an awesome Flex component and you want to share it with others and make a few bucks along the way. There are a few sites sprouting up to help you do just that. What follows isn’t as much a review as a features comparison. I hope it helps.

Note: as of May 2009 there are three sites that I know of where you can sell your Flex components: FlashDen.net, FlexDen.net and Adobe Exchange. I have been unable to contact anyone at Adobe about details on using Exchange so this post will focus on comparing the ‘Dens to each other. I’ll add more info as it becomes available.

Because the names FlashDen.net and FlexDen.net are so similar I will always lead a section by talking about FlashDen first for consistency and ease of reading.

Revenue Sharing
At FlashDen.net the percentage you receive depends on whether you agree to sell your component  exclusively at FlashDen.net or not. If you agree to exclusivity then your percentage starts out at 40% and climbs from there – see their rate schedule here. If you do not agree to exclusivity then you start out at 25%.

FlexDen.net makes no distinction between exclusive/non-exclusive. Everyone starts out at 60% and climbs from there. Here’s the breakdown:

• 60% = $0 – $4,999
• 65% = $5,000 – $9,999
• 70% = $10,000 – $14,999
• 75% = $15,000 – 19,999
• 80% = > $20,000

As a comparison FlashDen.net offers about 48% at $21,970 if you are exclusive. So FlexDen.net offers much higher revenue sharing.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that FlashDen.net offers less revenue potential based solely on the percentages. FlashDen.net has been around for 3+ years and has an established following. On the other hand FlexDen.net was just recently launched. So the traffic at FlexDen.net is automatically going to trail FlashDen.net for some time.

A caveat to the previous caveat is that there is no telling how many Flex developers visit FlashDen.net. FlashDen.net may have substantial traffic but they are just as new to selling Flex components as FlexDen.net.  In fact FlexDen.net launched before FlashDen.net added their Flex category.

If both sites wanted to be completely transparent then they could display user traffic, or better yet, the number of sales in the past month/week/whatever. Both sites do display the total sales and upload date for each component – so you do the math. And FlashDen.net also shows the number of sales per week/month for the top 20 selling components.

Price Setting
Both sites set the price of your component. That’s because they want to have a balance in prices between similar components. Otherwise it could turn into a jungle that would be confusing to buyers. If you have a problem with the price that they set then both sites are willing to talk to you and hopefully come to some agreement.

Source Code
FlashDen.net and FlexDen.net differ on how they treat source code. At FlashDen.net you must supply the source code in order to sell a component. And FlashDen.net requires code commenting and detailed instructions.

However at FlexDen.net you can chose whether or not you want to supply the source code with your component. If you do not supply the source code then it will be reflected by reducing the sale price of your component.

This might be a deal breaker for you. For one reason or another you may not be able to supply the source code and so you are left with to choice but to go with FlexDen.net.

FlashDen.net says that they require the source code because many of their buyers need to be able to tinker with the code in order for it to work in their projects. That is certainly true of Flash but does not apply so much to the Flex environment. If I have a component and I need to tinker with it then I just extend the component and do as I wish. Sure it helps to have the source code but isn’t necessary.

Removing a file
Both sites allow you to quickly and easily remove a file from public sale. At FlashDen.net you just go to your author page and click the delete button for the component you want to remove and it is removed instantly.

At FlexDen.net you contact the staff and they will remove it immediately.

Copy right policy
A concern anytime you are trying to make money from a component is that someone else will download it and then repackage your work and try to sell it themselves. This is an inevitable result in any market. One of the bonuses to the fact that both sites set the price of the component is that they will be intimately aware of what is in the library and can hopefully spot knockoffs at that time. If not and you notice that someone has copied your code you can contact the staff and they will work with you to resolve the conflict. FlexDen.net also has a flagging system that allows users to alert the staff should anything slip through.

You can read more about FlashDen’s copyright policy here.

Payout schedule
At FlashDen you can use your earnings to purchase things at FlashDen.net or any of the Envato Marketplaces. If you want your money in pocket then you have to make a request. If your balance is over $50 they will make a payout on the 15th of the following month. Check out the details at FlashDen for more info.

FlexDen.net has a very simple payout schedule: you get paid every Friday via Paypal and there is no minimum payout. FlexDen.net is also gearing toward a daily payout in the near future.

Brief history
Here’s brief history of FlashDen.net ( written by the site manager )

FlashDen.net was launched in November of 2006 with just a handful of Flash files. Sales were slow, but steady at first until a $10,000 giveaway promotion launched FlashDen to new heights. High quality files and a great community helped it grow even more. In just two and a half years, the site has reached over 160,000 members, with over 7000 files. In mid April, we started accepting Adobe Flex files, which we expect to flourish like the Flash categories. There’s been a recent influx of authors due to the significant increase in payout percentage. We just had our first member break the quarter million dollar sales mark, with others not far behind.

Here’s a brief history of FlexDen.net written by one of the partners:

In 2006, Brandon Broga, Web Designer, Programmer and CEO of Web Technologies had the idea to build a online Flex component marketplace. He then presented this idea to FlashDen to see if they were going to have a Flex section but they weren’t interested.  He was learning Flex at the time and found it very hard to find examples, resources and or working applications. Knowing the popularity and the high demand for RIA’s he bought the domain name FlexDen.net because he felt it was time to put the idea into action. Brandon partnered with Investor/Realtor, Marketing Expert Candace Clark from Hawaii, and with the help of Drupal Specialist Dzung Nova, FlexDen was born!

Conclusion
I hope that both sites are successful. This is a new and growing environment and there is room for many sites to offer Flex components. And competition between those sites is good for us developers.

As soon as I come up with an idea for a decent component I plan on putting it up for sale on both sites. I feel that the advantage FlashDen.net has with selling Flash components is washed out with the fact that they are just as new to selling Flex components as is FlexDen.net.

Plus, by not going with exclusivity at FlashDen.net I take a 15% reduction in revenue sharing. But I feel confident that I’ll make up for that by getting 60% at FlexDen.net.

It is also worth noting that both sites offer much more than just selling Flex components. FlashDen.net is part of a large family of websites that offer freelance advice, tutorials on many topics, themes, music, videos, et al.

And FlexDen.net also has more up its sleeve than just Flex components. You can currently look for freelance gigs and they are rapidly expanding. FlexDen.net encourages feedback from their users and they have set up a forum for that purpose. It is their intention to build a community website by listening to what the community wants. Soon they will have user pages where members can post their own articles and aggregate their various social media.

Personally I hope to see FlexDen.net grow into something like FlexExamples.com. Except where FlexExamples.com offers very concise examples for free FlexDen.net will offer more complete components that are ready to be dropped into your application for a small fee.

AIR
I didn’t mention AIR apps for either site because there are hundreds of sites where you can sell your AIR apps. And it’s likely that neither one of of the ‘Dens get anywhere near the traffic as someplace like Download.com. So if you’re looking to sell your AIR apps you have lots of options, including either of the ‘Dens.

Addendum : Info on Adobe Exchange
Copied from the comment below by Jeffry Houser: With the Adobe Developer Exchange, it is not an e-ecommerce site, it is just a directory. If you want to submit a commercial component, you have to provide the link to where people can buy it, which means building your own infrastructure for making the sale. For Flextras I built my own infrastructure.

If you have created a nifty little custom Flex component, or AIR app, and you want to share it then you need to decide if you want to try and make some money off of it or just give it away. There are pros and cons to each which I’ll talk about.

If you charge just $1 for your component/app then you will get a fraction of the users you could have gotten had you given it away. You have to ask yourself, “Do I want money or recognition.” If you already have an abundance of either then perhaps you should go for the other. Suppose you’re a rock star Flex developer living in San Francisco and working remotely for a company based in Denver – you know who you are. You have climbed to the top of the recognition latter so why not make a few bucks off your latest work?

On the other hand if know one knows who you are then releasing a kickass component or app free to the public can get you some recognition. That can turn into more friends on Facebook, more followers on Twitter and that can in turn lead to better job opportunities. So giving away your component/app can indirectly lead to more money as well.

Personally I had to make this decision a few years ago with a project of mine called videoMaru. I decided to give it away and it soon caught the eye of Collis at FlashDen.net. Even though FlashDen.net is about selling Flash components Collis featured videoMaru in many places on his site so that visitors would know all about it. About a year and a half later the recognition I had gained from videoMaru allowed me to quit my day job and become a fulltime freelance developer – something I’m very happy with. There is no doubt that it would have been much harder to make that transition had it not been for the recognition I received from videoMaru.

What are your thoughts and/or experiences on this topic?

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You can read the press release here.

I’m playing around with ideas from the book Mathographics by Robert Dixon. On pages 190-192 he has images of what he calls Condensation drawings. I call them Kissing Circles because the circles all touch each other at just one point – hopefully.

Here is my attempt. If you want to see something cool set the drop count to 1 and then use the right-arrow key to increment the drop count by one over and over so that you can see one drop at a time being added.

The author, Robert Dixon, doesn’t provide the code for his examples. Just the concept and how he would go about writing an algorithm to solve a particular problem. For this one he suggested that each circle gets pushed into an array. Then for each new circle – randomly placed – you loop through the array of existing circles to see if it overlaps with any of them. If not then you have a new circle to add to the display. Otherwise create a new circle in a random location and test again.

Code outline
My approach follows this general idea. I created a KissingCircles class that accepts 5 parameters:

• width, height, // area that the center of the circles can occupy
• circleCount, // number of circles to draw
• seed, // number that is used to seed the random number generator
• maxRadius

After drawing an initial circle to get things started I start looping through a while-loop that keeps track of the number of times through the loop – runs – and the number of circles that are successfully created – count.

Each time through the loop I use my PseudoRnd class to pick a random numbers for the x/y postion of a new circle. I then use the BitmapData.getPixel() method to find the color at that point. If it is white then I know that there is no circle at that point. ( The background is white. )

I’m using the PseudoRnd class because I want to be able to recreate a pattern. If the seed remains the same then the pattern will always be exactly the same for the same number of circles.

If the space it clear to draw a circle then I need to fit it up against the nearest circle to that point. To do so I loop through all of the existing circles to find the one that it is closest to. Once I have the nearest circle I check and see if it is further away than the maxRadius. If not then I’m done. The new circle will be drawn right up against the nearest one.

But if it is further away then I need to reposition the circle so that it has a radius equal to maxRadius and is right up against the nearest circle. This is where the Math.atan2( y, x ) method comes in handy. ( Check out my Math.atan2( y, x ) Explorer for an example of how it works. )

Now we have a new circle that has been placed right up against the nearest circle. Since the new circle has been moved we need to make sure that it didn’t get dropped on top of an existing circle so once more through the loop of all existing circles with the checkOverlap() method.

That pretty much does it.

Code evolved
This approach evolved over time. Initially I didn’t have a value for the maxRadius. So each new circle was exactly the radius it needed to be in order to just kiss up against the nearest circle. That’s fine but if the new circle is a long way from the nearest circle it means that this new circle will be huge. It could take up most of the available space.

If I were doing this over from scratch I might try picking a random circle from the array of all existing circles and then fit a new circle up against it. I think that might run a little faster because it would remove some of the looping that is needed to make sure that circles don’t overlap.

Interesting additions
I think it would be cool to let each circle animate from a point size up to its calculated radius over time. That might be a neat effect.

Do you have any suggestions for how to improve this?

Suppose you wanted to track the position of the cursor in a TextArea. You might need to do this if you wanted to provide some contextual information to the user. And if you do so you want to position the message very near to where the user is typing.

The TextArea provides a lot of information and some of it can be used to approximate the location of the cursor but it isn’t precise.  But I did happen upon an idea that gets the position of the last typed character very accurately. Check it out below:

You should be able to see the red dot follow the cursor around. I’m doing this by checking the BitmapData of the TextArea every time the text changes. I then combine that with the BitmapData from the previous change in text and apply a Difference blend mode. You can see that in the black box at the bottom. What is different each time is the last character.

Now I can use the getColorBoundsRect method on the BitmapData to find the x/y coordinates of the last character. Actually, I have to mix in a little threshold magic because the blending doesn’t produce exactly white pixels and the getColorBoundsRect is very picky. You can check out the source code for a full explaination.