It's been a while since I've written a post on here .. mostly because I just changed jobs. I was at Schematic in Boston before Monday. I'm at Almighty (also in Boston) now. Almighty seems like an awesome fit. Everyone there is pretty cool and they do excellent work. I could go into more detail about everything like why Almighty is better than Schematic, etc ... but that's for another discussion.
What is really bothering me is the fact that I'm on a Mac now. No, I don't hate Macs. I actually love OSX, and when I sold my Mac three years ago, I really missed OSX. Given that... my gripe is with the Flash community and the lack of a good ActionScript editor.
In the past two days, I've tried TextMate, SE|PY, and FDT for Eclipse. FDT seems like the best answer for what I'm looking to do, except I can't get code-hinting to work. TextMate is better than SE|PY in that it doesn't crash. However, SE|PY has code-hinting.
Now here's where the real issue comes from, I've been developing in FlexBuilder or FlashDevelop for the past year (FlashDevelop even longer). FlexBuilder is awesome for AS3. Code and class lookups, etc... and FlashDevelop has many of the same features. However, Builder doesn't like AS2 (am I wrong?) and FlashDevelop runs on .NET so kiss that idea good-bye.
Does anyone know of any good editors for OSX that are perfect for ActionScript 2/OOP editing, or should I keep trying to get FDT to work?
10 Responses to “AS2/OOP OSX Editors?”
The only other one I’d say to try is AS Development Tools (ASDT) plug-in for Eclipse.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aseclipseplugin/
I would follow up with the FDT forum though and see if you can get your code completion working.
Keep using FlashDevelop – using XP and Parallels. P3 beta 2 now has shared desktops/folders/etc. and it makes it really easy to use. I do this myself for AS2 stuff (can’t beat FlexBuilder for AS3)
TextMate might be your best option, however you could also consider running Parallels or VMWare Fusion on your Mac so you can continue to run FlashDevelop.
I’ve always used SE|PY on the mac. Doesn’t seem to be any less stable than on my windows box. Then again, after spending one afternoon trying to develop in the Flash IDE on the mac, a scrap of card board and a pencil don’t seem so bad either.
Good luck.
Id stick with fdt. You probably need to set your class paths and make sure your core library is set up. Perhaps you can provide some more information? Id be down with helping out.
Have you taken a look at Smultron? It is a very basic text editor but has code hinting of a sort, color coding, etc. Might be worth a look.
http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
I actually use parallels in order to use FD3, I wish it was more direct, but you can share a directory across the 2 OS’s, still use FD in windows, and compile/edit in osx flash (or back in win for that matter). I don’t think theres anything good in osx for as2, nothing that can live up to FD anyway.
I gave up on SEPY for the same reason, but I did like its drag-drop imports, and interface generation to a class template.
I’ve since moved on to FD3, but our mac based developer is in the same boat you are. Only thing I can suggest (not being a mac user myself) is to run FD2/3 in VM environment? Not sure what it would do to your compile speeds though.
Wow .. Thanks for the response. Parallels seems like the best way to go, unfortunately I’m on a PPC based G5. I may end up buying a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Todd Anderson has one and seems to really like it. Maybe I can run a “buy Marc a Mac” fun-raiser like John Grden. I’ll take a look at smultron too.
Not sure where I could help you find a “Marc” to buy, but for my AS2, I’m using Eclipse w/ FDT.
It works pretty good, and like Nate said, you probably just need to adjust your classpaths & core libraries to get the code hinting working.
One thing about FDT though is that it’s great for when you’ll be on one project for a while. But once you start working on multiple projects, and creating them more often, it’s not that nice anymore. Creating a new AS2 project is a lot more work than it really should be.
For AS3 though, nothing beats FlexBuilder.