Archive for the ‘Eclipse’ Category

AS3 Development in OSX

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

I had a small AS3 project and decided I would stray from the standard Flash Builder solution provided by adobe to see how things have changed over the last few years. I ended up looking at two solutions. Being major TextMate fan I set it up and hooked it up to the Flex SDK. On the recommendation of a colleague I checked out the latest version of FDT as well.

TextMate 2 still supports AS3. Due to the broad nature of the application it does require some setting up. There is a plugin for As3. The plugin however is not the only part of the setup process. See setup instructions here. If you already use TextMate or have an affinity for it then its very usable once you get through the setup process.

FDT used to be a Eclipse plugin back in the day. Some where between FDT 3 and FDT 5 it became its own app. Well you get eclipse pre-bundled with it. FDT used to be quite pricy. How ever now they offer a free version. The free version does not have all the bells and whistles you get with the paid for version but if your looking for is a quick and easy way to compile AS3 projects. It has a two step setup process and practically works out of the box. The only thing you have to do is hook it up to the Flex sdk then all the settings have defaults and you set them all in a GUI.

In short FDT is the easiest and quickest solution if all you want is to get in, compile then out.

FDT 3 Object not being treated as dynamic

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

After installing FDT 3 I opened up a project I was working on and practically every class was loaded with errors and warnings. The warnings were no surprise but the errors were really getting to me. After a little look it seemed all the errors came from dataproviders and other things made from the object class. It seems the object class was not being treated as dynamic. So any undeclared variables used in an object flagged a horrible error.

 

This seems to me to be a FDT error. Maybe not exactly an error with FDT as FDT is interpreting the object class correctly. It’s the Object class that is not defined correctly. If you look you will see the Array class does not have the same problem. This due to object not being defined as dynamic, so if you go to the Object.as in the core library in FDT and add “dynamic” after “intrinsic” save then refresh your project all the errors should vanish.

Help in FDT

Monday, November 26th, 2007

I was looking up a help file in Flash. You know right click “View Help”. I got to thinking, surely FDT should be able to do the same thing. I took a look and low and behold it did. IF you(FDT3):

Window -> Preferences -> FDT -> Tools -> Flash Help

As long as you installed Flash in its default location simply hit “Apply” reset eclipse and you will have access to the help by pressing “F1” on any Flash key word.

Eclipse Bug

Monday, March 26th, 2007

Hay this was a massive surprise. I was associating eclipse with an already created ActionScript project I was working with. I selected the the project content and added a preexisting folder I then realized it was the wrong folder so I pressed back. After that the folder and all its content were gone except for a “.project” file that was pretty useless. Lucky for me I back up regularly only lost a few hours of work. Just something to keep in mind for all us Eclipse based flash developers 😉