Wednesday, October 11, 2006

FlashDevelop

I just discovered a cool, open source tool for creating Flash (without Flash) called FlashDevelop. It is for folks who prefer coding to the Flash timeline. The UI for working with a project is very good, it is similiar to Visual Studio. You can view a project in class view, where each class shows what it extends, imports, its methods, and properties. It makes it very easy to jump around in a class or even jump up the inheritance heirarchy to look at the method stubs of the parent. The code completion works for the classes you create and for other classes you import(like Tween). It uses MTASC as the compiler, which can help catch errors.

Give it a try. Here is a good introduction to the tool at flashmagazine.com. You'll appreciate it even if you only use it as an editor for ActionScript (and not for the entire development of a project).

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

XYplorer

I just came across a great file manager for Windows call XYplorer. It is fast and has a great user interface. One of the things I like is the preview pane. It allows you to preview quite a few different, common file types like HTML, XML, JPG, PNG, PDF, and SWF (and more). It also has very good search features. One simple thing it has that is great is the ablity to copy the full path to a file. Another nice feature is viewing the date as the age of the file (or its modification). For example, if you set the date modified to age, then it shows how long ago the file was modified (5 secs, 10 mins, 3 hrs (whatever the case may be). The price seems a little on the high-side, around $40. I'll have to see how addicted I get to it during its 21-day trial.