In my last post, I detailed how we planned to donate 50% of our gross sales from SmartMouth to the California State Parks Foundation for the remainder of June. This morning I tallied up the sales numbers for the last half of June and entered our donation. AJ and I decided to round up and donate an even $200. We hope that this modest contribution helps to maintain some part of the CA Parks system and/or supports the fight to keep the parks open to the public.
Thanks to everyone who purchased SmartMouth and thanks to everyone who helped to spread the word!
We still encourage everyone to donate directly, voice your opinion to California governor, Jerry Brown, and if you live in California, please contact your representatives.
The title says it all, really. AJ and I have been fretting the loss of some of our favorite parks. AJ attended a meeting last Friday for the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks & Wildlife chaired by Jared Huffman. There were several productive ideas voiced at this meeting and it compelled us to take action ourselves.
For the rest of the month of June, a full 50% of the gross sales (before taxes) of SmartMouth, our auto-lipsyncing tool for Flash, will be donated to the California State Parks Foundation. For example, if you buy 1 seat of SmartMouth at $49.99, and suppose Paypal takes $1.99 for processing, we’ll donate $24 of the remaining $48 (and still pay the taxes on $48), and so on.
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Well, 2010 was a pretty exciting year for Ajar Productions. We released a new Flash animation book with Chris Georgenes (I served as co-author, and AJ as tech editor). I spoke at the Adobe MAX conference in LA again. Shortly after MAX, we released SmartMouth, our first commercial product. SmartMouth licenses have been selling pretty regularly ever since. At some point, we hope that our software products will become our primary source of revenue. The income from commercial products should make it easier to continue releasing free products and leave time to produce more tutorials (we hope).
We’ve hit the ground running this year as well. I collaborated with Adobe to produce a video that was featured on the Flash team’s Youtube and Facebook pages, and received some fantastic feedback. Last week, I was also delighted to learn that I’d been selected to become an Adobe Community Professional.
With one month already over in 2011, we’ve got a lot to look forward to in the remaining 11 months. We’re going to be pushing some updates for SmartMouth in the coming months and we’d love to hear from you. Let us know what you think about the product—good, bad, indifferent—the more details the better. We’ve also got a long list of ideas for new tools. We’ll probably only have time to focus on a select few, and we’ll post updates as we have more information available. If you have ideas for products you’d like to see from us, let us know using this form.
I hope to include more tutorials on the blog this year, probably starting with a series on learning JSFL. It sounds like AJ will be involved with some more books this year, more on that later. Let us know in the comments if there’s anything particular that you’d like to see on the blog this year.
We very much appreciate all the donations last year! Thanks for another year of reading and supporting us!
The bona fide internets, even. I’m in the Adobe Developer Spotlight this month.
Even though the economy is completely haywire, parts of the community have proved to be very reliable. Aaron Simpson at ColdHardFlash is offering help for animators seeking work, and Adobe is offering a free copy of FlexBuilder to members of the community who are unemployed.
Kudos to both of them. Hopefully more organizations will follow suit.
Two days ago I went to visit the Ajar Productions main page and found that the blog feed was generating an error. In looking at the feed, I found there was a long and obfuscated <script> tag at the end of the file. In searching further, I found that the same script had been appended to nearly every page named ‘index’ on our webserver. My best guess is that this was a WordPress hack. So I spent quite a bit of time cleaning out the offending code from every page and adding about a dozen new security measures to the site. I think that the intended effect of the hack was to redirect traffic away from our pages, but I don’t know if it was successful. My apologies if anyone was redirected while visiting our site.
I found these links especially helpful in improving the security of the site:
