Page 1 of 3 Out there in the Flash design and development world, there are many tools available to assist in creating projects. These are "power tools" that supercharge the task of designing, coding, compiling, testing and documenting, allowing you to save time and present ideas much more effectively. Some have been around for a few years, and some are pretty new. This series highlights some of the open source tools and techniques which have made my life as a Flash developer much more effective.
This article covers a utility which I consider to be paramount to any Flash developer's toolkit: the FlashTracer extension for Firefox.
Image 1: The FlashTracer Firefox extension
Many Flash designers & developers have been in this situation: you go to publish a SWF file, and it works fine when tested in the IDE. But when you deploy to a server environment, it does not act as it should. Or perhaps your application cannot be tested locally at all because it makes server calls, or is limited by the Flash 8 security sandbox. So you create a series of trace statements... oh wait, you can't. Trace statements can only be seen in the Output panel in the IDE. What do you do?
You could implement one of the following techniques:
Up until recently I used #1 as the quickest method for debugging applications. For more complex applications where I need to see object states in real-time without having to litter my code with trace-like statements, I use a third party application such a solution #4. I have found solutions #2 & 3 are just too ungainly to be useful.
And really, for simple applications, sometimes you wish you could just see the trace statements live in the browser and be done with it instead of using a host or workarounds.
Well the wait is over.
Keywords
flash, flash player, debug, debugger, plugin, firefox, extension, flash tracer, trace, tools, powertools
