Dovyski

These days I was looking for intranet solutions and I luckily found Open Atrium, an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations.

OpenAtrium is built on top of Drupal, has a nice design and a useful set of features:

• Blog: A classic blog for each group that has commenting, file attachments on both the post and comments, and granular notifications.
• Calendar: A calendar that lets you quickly add events, suck in iCal and other calendar feeds, and support single or multi-day events.
• Group Dashboard: Mini widgets give you a snapshot of all the activity happening across your groups.
• Documents: A simple online handbook that lets you collaborate on documents, store and compare revisions, attach files, and once you're done print out the final copy.
• Shoutbox: Kind of like a private twitter, the shoutbox lets you share short messages, links, and information with just the people in your group.
• Case Tracker: A full ticketing system that lets you assign to do's and create unlimited projects within each of your groups. The case tracker also lets you classify the to do, give it a priority, and manage its status.

For small companies, it is an efficient tool to create/maintain an intranet.

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!