Comments on: iSWF: Actionscript Development on a Mac

By: Jeremy Daley

Jeremy Daley — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:54:48 +0000

i’m a pc user but not opposed to macs. i gotta say i’ve never really had much of a liking of eclipse and the Flex SDK. out of the box, it just doesn’t seem to work as smoothly as i’d like and on windows seems kinda resource intense when compared to (what i consider the superior AS3 IDE) FlashDevelop… which consequently only runs on the Windows .NET framework.

also, to touch on a few of my own annoyances with mac:
1.) maximize -> as a web dev, i WANT to know what widescreen users are seeing in the “pillar box”. having stuff show behind seems like it would be distracting.
2.) “home” and “end” keys. even linux sends the cursor to the beginning or end of the line with these, where in mac you have to hit command+left arrow or something. this to me is important if you wanna get devs onto a mac, but who am i.

By: mp

mp — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:56:52 +0000

Useful site. Thank you:-)

By: The Tortoise and the Tiger: SVN on OS X Finder « Bobspace - Bob Walton

The Tortoise and the Tiger: SVN on OS X Finder « Bobspace - Bob Walton — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:46:14 +0000

[...] an earlier post about Actionscript development on the Mac. It was mentioned that one of the big holes in the Mac development suite was a SVN client as good [...]

By: Step Schwarz

Step Schwarz — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:40:40 +0000

The Home and End button equivalent is command-left arrow and command-right arrow. And in a single-line text field you can just use the up and down arrows.

By: Frank Manno

Frank Manno — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 21:49:17 +0000

Looking forward to your next post. As a newbie to AS, any advice and tips will be helpful!

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 10:01:46 +0000

Nice article.

I switched to a MacBook recently too, intending to continue doing most of the Flash/Flex work on the windows machine.

Not so, I even enjoy working in the Mac book, when there is no 2nd monitor attached. Btw: I like to use TextMate for writing AS2 classes.

Speeking about speed: I recently converted the a QT Movie using the Flash Video Encoder. On an Win 2,4 GHz P4, 1GB RAM it took about 3 Minutes. Same file on a mac: close to 10 Minutes (2GHzCore 2 Dual Mac, 1 GHz RAM) using the Rosetta-interpreted version of the encoder.

As Bob wrote the difference is muss less tangible when you compile a small flash movie in the Flash IDE.

And: Flash 9 will be released in the next 2-5 month, and because of native support for the intel macs it will be a whole lot faster than the Rosetta-Flash solution we’re now working with.

By: sat

sat — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 23:42:29 +0000

Bob, Apple’s own diff tool is fantastic. It’s called FileMerge and if you pull out the Developer Tools DVD that you got with the Mac and install them, it’ll be in /Developer/Applications/Utilities.

For SVN there’s a great (and free!) little OS X app called svnX that’s native on Intel Macs (with drap & drop support). See http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/svnx.html

By: brendan

brendan — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 22:54:51 +0000

All for macs and I have 3. Switched 1 year ago and you won’t stop me now! Shortcuts work like they are supposed to when getting around, awesome. However running parallels and win xp on 2ghz core duo mac mini with 2 gig ram I noticed that mac flash player runs at between 45 – 55 frames/sec in firefox and safari and at 85 fps in windows flash player in firefox and ie … Anyone know what is up with that? all flash player 9

By: Erki Esken

Erki Esken — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:59:54 +0000

On svn and diff tool front, I’ve found SmartSVN and SmartSynchronize work out quite well. One thing to now on SmartSVN, it comes with JVM max memory setting quite low, you can change it to a higher value (Show Package Contents in Finder, and edit Info.plist) if you experience out of memory error on giant svn projects.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:00:34 +0000

bobspace –
But I’m more interested in how the Flash IDE compares with a compile of the same complex FLA on:
~3yr old PC running XP
new imac or mac mini
mac pro

.. and yep.. I use 3 monitors for the Flash IDE on my PC. There are some bugs and odd behaviors when you use the Flash IDE on multiple windows on a PC and I’d like to know if the mac version has the same issues (or more or less).