I ran through the tutorial in the Towards Open Source Flash Development article. Upon compiling my first open source SWF, a “Wow!” escaped my lips through a nervous laugh; my hands started to shake. When I got the Alert component part to work, the same thing happened again… “Wow! HA HA!!!”
There are a plethora of instructions, both on the site, and in each of the pieces’ intsall instructions… but none of it was painful at all to install and configure. And Eclipse, geez, so far it feels pretty nice. I’ve tried for 4 years, unsuccessfully, to use another external editor other than Flash to create & manage my ActionScript in. I won’t know for another few weeks if we have a winner, but I must say, I like the workflow so far. Why?
I don’t have to leave… sort of.
The “hack” as it’s described ActionScript.com’s site doesn’t feel that hackish at all. You just instantiate your class & include the necessarey components in the library. That’s not hard, nor evil feeling at all; it’s a fact of Flash development life.
More investigation is necessarey to see how it compiles my current projects, how diffucult it is to set them up in Eclipse, and what, if any, code is needed to change to ensure it compiles correctly with MTASC.
So far, the tabbed interface, a Project panel that actually works well, an Outline view (which has yet to prove its usefulness), all visible at the same time with colored code… feels nice. The Flashout tab makes things feel professional. I have a SWF, traces, and compiler configuration controls built right in.
Why am I using the Flash IDE again? This is cool! Let’s see if I’m singing the same tune in 2 weeks; that’s been my Acid test over the past 4 years. I am recently starting to have to utilize Java at work, so that adds a few points for the Eclipse route.
I encourage others to try it out.
Reference links:
I’ve been trying to come up with an anacronym from the letters of “E”, “A”, “M”, and “F” to describe these various technologies that make up this new workflow. FAME, perhaps?
