iSWF: Actionscript Development on a Mac

Actionscript development, namely object-oriented Flash and Flex, has been dominated by Windows PCs for as long as I can remember. Even with Flash overlapping the Mac-heavy design world, the overwhelming majority of the Flash developers — and even designers — that I’ve come across have been using Windows.

I think that’s going to change.

I know many developers who have starting working on a Mac and are raving about it. Since I was due for a new machine recently, I decided to make the switch myself and start developing on an Intel-powered MacBook Pro. While there are a few drawbacks, overall I think it’s a great choice and I highly recommend it.

The Pros

Everyone’s already heard the reasons why people prefer OS X to Windows so let me just skim through them. So there are no mac viruses, it’s super stable, easy to use, etc… But here are my favorite features:

• Any time you enter a password on your mac — in any program — it stores it in a special repository called Keychain. If you forget a password or need to share one with somebody, you can look it up. Genius!
• Speaking of passwords, when you connect to a wifi network, you don’t have to enter the network key FRIGGIN’ TWICE, BLIND! On a 128 bit WEP, that’s absolutely maddening! On a mac, you enter it once (duh) and you can even look at the key as you’re entering it, if you’d like.
• You can drag anything into almost anything else and it will do something intelligent. You can alt-tab into different applications while dragging. In an open document, you can drag the document icon, shown on the title bar, to some place in the file system and it will move the document to that location. In short, dragging, like almost everything else, is unbelievably intuitive.
• For some reason, you can do so much more with the same amount of screen real estate on a Mac. My new Mac has a max resolution of 1440×900, down from the 1680×1050 res of the HP laptop I was using previously. Strangely, it feels like I have twice as much now as I did then. That’s partially because Mac apps tend to have less chrome than their PC counterparts. But more importantly, Macs treat the concept of “maximizing” a window totally differently. When you maximize a window, it only grows to the size it needs, rather than taking up the whole screen. That means you can see several apps at once and easily navigate between them.

All of that said, it was the hardware — not the operating system — that turned the people I know over to the mac.

Earlier this year, I was working with Jesse Warden when he got his Mac, a black MacBook laptop. His other laptop was an enormous, specced-out Alienware that felt like it was made out of cement. The MacBook was brought into his fleet as an “email machine,” allowing him to check his email and surf the web while traveling, leaving all of his development to onsite desktop machines.

I checked back with him recently and he’s using his Mac much more. He had this to say:

“Onsite with a client, I was starting to use my Mac 100% of the time… It doesn’t weigh 14.5 pounds like my Alienware, only 4.  It fits in my Flash MX 2004 Timbuk bag nicely; the Alienware didn’t really fit well… at all.  It has built in wireless that just… works, unlike the Alienware which was clunky to get working and the card stuck out of the already behmoth machine.  It looks good, and therefore, gives me a professional look to my clients.”

My friends at effectiveUI have been even more aggressive with their Mac migration. They’ve moved nearly their entire development team — dozens of engineers — over to the Mac. The new intel-based laptops allow their team to move easily around the office and around the country, while working on the same ultra-portable machine. And I’ve heard nothing but great reports from them about FlexBuilder’s performance on the Mac. It seems to be every bit as stable as the PC version.

The Cons

There are a few pain points with working on the Mac. First among these: compiling is slower. This is experienced mainly in flash, where the compiler uses the old PowerPC instructions that have to be translated for the new intel Macs. When I mentioned this to Jesse, he wasn’t terribly concerned. He keeps his larger projects in Flex, so his Flash projects contain much less work for the compiler. “The Flash IDE as a compiling solution works fine for a lot of the smaller scoped tasks I use it for, where the heavy lifting is done in Flex.” He continued, “A lot of my software just doesn’t run as fast.  I’ve been SERIOUSLY impressed with Adobe’s efforts, though, so know it’ll work eventually.”

Jesse noticed some other problems that I didn’t. His favorite SVN client, Tortoise, and his favorite diff tool, Beyond Compare, are not available for Mac. Though Subclipse works just fine on OS X, it seems to be a lot more buggy and obscure than rock-solid tortoise. And as a diff tool, Subclipse is not able to do the same local folder comparisons that Jesse relies on with Beyond Compare. We’re both on the hunt for better tools.

I must also say that the Flash IDE is a lot clunkier on a Mac. The panels don’t nest quite as well, so it feels like you’d need two displays to get a highly functional AS1 workflow going. That and the “Home” and “End” keys don’t jump to the beginning and end of a line like you’d want them to. Ugh!

Conclusion

If you’re willing to overlook a few minor quirks and annoyances. The Macintosh environment seems to make a great development platform. You get to use largely the same development tools on hardware and software that’s far superior to any Windows box.

And heck, if there’s that one Windows program that you have to have, you can even run it on your Apple via Parallels or Boot Camp, something I didn’t have time to get into.

Coming Up Next…

I’ll walk through setting up FDT on a mac and explain how to tame its out-of-control core libraries.

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