Hello! Well, I must admit it’s been a while since my last sporadic post and as with English buses, you wait for one then three come in quick succession. Of course, its not because I particularly didn't want to post here but life has been dragging me around as of late, holidays, re:MVP'ing and an interesting diversion towards ActionScript 2.0...
For those of you not familiar with ActionScript - it’s the scripting language that is built into Flash 6 and onwards. Its ECMA Styley scripting so anyone with JavaScript experience should be able to jump into it pretty easily and ActionScript 2.0 (usable from Flash 7 and above) has become quite an interesting language to use to a very high level as well as the new XML, Stream and FLV objects.
However, if there's one problem with developing ActionScript code, it’s that the Macromedia Actionscript environment is rubbish. In fact, that's building it up - its utter crap. So I went on a hunt around the Internet looking for an ActionScript development environment that supported Intellisense including all custom developed objects. Anyhoo, to cut a long story short I found this Open Source project called 'FlashDevelop' (http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/) that delivers everything. Easy to use and not overpowering, this little fella must have saved me days during the last project I worked on - basically because I could approach the project like a true development project, e.g. as I would with VS2005's IDE.
In addition, the editor also supports JavaScript, PHP along with some other odds and sods, which might not warrant any extended time when used for development, but to dip and in and out it is superb.
M