FlashDevelop 2 RC1

It’s taken me a while to completely settle with an ActionScript editor… SEPY was my tool of choice for well over a year, but I knew that it had its problems, mainly speed and stability. It has plenty of awesome features, but quickly became way too bloated for just an ActionScript editor. It took too long to open and, what’s worse, it would sometimes take up to 2 seconds for the context sensitive completion to popup… something that should be instantaneous.

The new year then rolled around and Keith Peters mentioned that Sapien was having a sale on their popular PrimalScript editor. I remember them having the same sale the year before and I passed on it, but this time I decided to bite the bullet and *gasp* actually spend money on an editor. At first I was very impressed, the context sensitive completion was instantaneous, it had a nice class explorer, and what impressed me the most (and still does) is the extrememly fast context sensitive help… put your cursor on a keyword and hit F1 and a built in browser will almost instantaneously open up showing the flash (or whatever language you are currently using) help for that keyword. The first thing that annoyed me was that you could compile from PrimalScript to Flash by going into a menu and pressing a button, but you couldn’t make a keyboard shortcut for it… I really just wanted to hit CTRL-ENTER like you do in Flash. What I quickly realized with PrimalScript is that you can make suggestions to Sapien and they are quick to respond, and probably even quick to make changes(although not at all to creating a simple keyboard shortcut for a particular menu item), but since its a commercial product you have to wait for them to make another release of the product until you can use that change.

But luckily enough, right when I started trying out PrimalScript, another ActionScript editor was beginning to get some buzz… FlashDevelop. I downloaded my first version of it on January 12th with the release of version 2 Beta8 and haven’t looked back. What a great app! First of all, its free… you can’t beat that. Second, its opensource, so you can download the source at any point and compile your own version of the app right when they make a change to the app, not needing to wait for an official release. Now these things alone wouldn’t be that great if the app was no good, … but the app is more than just good. The context sensitive completion is instantaneous, the project explorer is fantastic, letting you quickly navigate through the classes in your project, you can press F6 and compile the movie in Flash (or even change that keyboard shortcut to CTRL-ENTER if you so like), press F1 on a keyword and get context sensitive help (although not yet as fast as PrimalScript), and this next one is very nice, press F4 on a class or member of an instance of a class it will open that class (and even scroll to the member you selected) or if you currently have a package selected, the Files panel will browse to that package’s path… very nice addition.

I’ve been using FlashDevelop alone for well over two months at home and at work and can’t look back… it is such a great app, it hasn’t crashed on me once and its still in beta … well until today. Today they have released the first release candidate, getting it ever closer to the official 2.0.0 release.

If all of this isn’t enough, the authors of the software are extremely open to suggestions and will implement those suggestions (if they are good suggestions) in relatively short turnaround, allowing you to build your own copy with the change that you requested as soon as its done. With the new release there’s a new XMLCompletion plugin that allows you to get context sensitive completion for xml and html docs, and if we’re lucky a CSSCompletion plugin might be on its way after my suggestion the other day… keep your fingers crossed, I may not ever have to open that way too bloated Dreamweaver again.

So don’t take my word for it, if you haven’t tried it out yet, get over there now and download the latest version. You won’t regret it.

Download FlashDevelop