Dovyski

If you work with Flash like I do you probably have said a bunch of bad words while you were coding AS3 using the native Flash IDE AS editor. I like Adobe, I really do, Flash can do amazing things and the IDE is getting more and more powerfull, however as a AS3 project manager, the Flash IDE sucks.

I could have saved tons of working hours if Flash IDE had some sort of smart code completion, or if it had a better project manager panel (a simple one that hides the SVN directories, for instance). The logical choise for me would be change to another IDE or methodology, such as Flex Buider, but sometimes I'm binded to the Flash IDE because I can't use a different approach.

Tired of wasting my time coding like that, I've decided to search for a better AS3 development tools. Thanks to the open source community, I've found FlashDevelop, a  free and open source ActionScript 2/3 and web development environment.  It seemlessly integrates with Adobe Flash IDE, Adobe Flex SDK, Mtasc, Haxe and Swfmill.

Some of the features:

• AS2 Project management with seamless Swfmill and Mtasc integration (using a portable standalone command line tool).
• Advanced ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3 completion & code exploration with automatic classpath detection (even without project).
• Smart contextual Actionscript code generators.
• SWF and SWC classes and symbols exploration.
• Test movie in Adobe Flash IDE and with clickable error results (Flash CS3).
• MTASC compilation/code checking with clickable error results.
• Types Explorer.
• Automatically cleans ASO files of modified AS2 classes.
• Files explorer (can create Flash 8 Trust Files for you).
• Automatic JavaDoc creation from methods.
• Smart Actionscript help websearch on F1.
• Jump to class/member declaration on F4.
• XML, HTML/PHP, JS, CSS code highlighting.
• Multibyte character encoding.
• Program menu customization with XML files.
• as2api GUI for documentation generation.
• Snippets, lines bookmarks, code folding and zoom.

FlashDevelop has enhanced my production cycle and I think it can do the same for you. Download it now and enjoy!

Some years ago, the only thing that came to my mind when I heard the word "web" was "very simple websites", a bunch of bytes available for browing. Google was not even born at that time and everyhing was focused on desktop applications. If your application was able to connect to the web, then it could update itself in a easy way, nothing else.

The main flow was to bring every single business plan into the desktop world: office stuff (such as Microsoft Office), e-mail (Outlook), image, music, movies, etc. In the web world at that time, Javascript was an ugly word to be fired and Flash was just a way to make things look a little bit better.

The world is different now and ironically it seems to be the opposite of what it was in the past. Instead of bringing things into the desktop, the idea is to take them to the cloud, make them available on the web. This is happening very fast, but sometimes it's useful to have some desktop behavior in a web app, such as offline access to your e-mails.

Why can't we use the best things of those two words (web and the desktop)? Even better, why can't we use our web development knowledge to create hybrid apps that work in those two worlds? In fact, we can, and a lot of people have noticed that.

The first one I can recall is Adobe with Apollo, on March 19, 2007. Apollo, after named to Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Flash, HTML or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application. A very powerful tool able to create nice apps featuring half desktop half web blood.

Right after Adobe, Mozilla started working on a similtar idea and on October, 2007, Prism was born. It is open source, like all the things Mozilla does, and it splits web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. Prism development is not fast as Adobe's AIR is, but they are moving forward.

These days I've found a brand new tool like those previous ones: Appcelerator Titanium. As far as I could see, it works just like AIR, but it is open source. I read a few forum threads at Titanium forum and some developers said their Titanium apps were running faster then their AIR versions. Another very nice thing is you can use sevel languages to code your application, such as PHP and Phyton instead of only HTML and Javascript.

If you were thinking about developing an desktop-and-web application in a easy way, take a look at those options above. I'm sure you will have a lot of heavy weapons available to make your ideas to come true.