[osflash] Disseminaing OSFlash

[João Saleiro]

Since no one had a reaction to my previous mail (it was so big, and my english is so bad :P that it's natural that no one had read it), here is the most important part. I think this is an important subject, that's why i'm insisting... sorry for that...




Following this suggestion of henrik weber:

 >a blog (e.g. titled 'osflash-universe') uniting the different opinions 
of the os-
 >flash-community would be great.
 >if you need help in designing a layout for it; let me know  ;) 

I think this is a good idea. But i also think that it would be VERY 
important to show new potential users what's so great about OSFlash. Let 
people know that there is an excelent ROI on using osflash, so they 
would want to invest their time researching and developing using osflash 
technologies. Also, create a showcase with the best osflash projects, 
detailed description on the technologies and techniques used to develop 
each of them and probably brief depoiments of the developers, so new 
users can trust osflash technologies, reading the success stories.

When i decided to try osflash techs, i was making my project using the 
Flash IDE (with bad practices :P). One day, by coincidence i saw this 
post on Aral's Blog: http://aralbalkan.com/563 . That was the first time 
i read the "osflash" word. At the beginning it was the story that 
convinced me, not the osflash technologies. After that, when first saw 
the osflash main page, i was very disappointed. I didn't know where to 
begin, there were a lot of different projects with different purposes, 
lack of tutorials on some subjects, and other subjects with too much 
different tutorials dispersed on the web. I had a deadline very tight, 
and i was afraid that i was investing time for nothing. I wanted to see 
some good success cases before taking the risk, but at the time there 
weren't success cases around (at least i don't remember seeing one:| ). 
And i was already a believer on the Flash capabilities, so imagine how 
someone who thinks that Flash is only a design tool for making banners, 
feels when entering this new world.

What we currently have is an excellent platform for developers. It does 
not attract new users easily because it's not meant to. If we want to 
have more people believing and using osflash technologies, i think we 
should create a web-site showing the capabilities of osflash. With news, 
and/or a blog, simple and straightforward "getting started" tutorials, a 
showcase with success stories, a more generalist forum/mailing list for 
newbies with noob questions, and contacts for some osflashers willing to 
give consulting, so enterprises can easily reach them. This would be the 
entry point on the osflash world. After that, everything remains the 
same, with the current platform aiming developers and "advanced" users.

If we want to attract more people, we need to put ourselfs on their 
place and understand what they feel about osflash at the beginning. But 
this is just my opinion, of course....  :) 

Cheers,

João Saleiro