Flash tools of the trade: debug

I try not to regurgitate info from other blogs…
But I have to talk about a entry from Alessandro: because it makes me “extremely” happy.

The creator of SE|PY: Alessandro Crugnola has created his first firefox extension. Good for him, but what it´s to me?

Well… it’s one of the first tools that makes it possible to trace / debug in Firefox.
While running any .SWF Flash file in your browser you can see all the output generated by the “trace” flash functions in this sidebar component. This is very useful especially working with server side technology.
You can debug without anyone knowing this, even with on a live site: only people that have this extension installed will know this.

You just need to install the debug version of the flashplayer and the Firefox extension and you’re ready to go!

It made me painfully aware that we Flash-developers leave a lot of “traces” behind in the .SWF’s.
But this can be fixed: just check ‘Omit trace actions’ in the publish settings.

FlashTracer – While running any .swf Flash file in your browser you can see all the output generated by the “trace” flash functions in this sidebar component.
You *NEED* the flash player debug version to run this extension correctly: flashplayer_9_plugin_debug

Update #1: A colleague found a “funny” trace at youtube: it has something to do with the play button not wanting to appear….