Flashmech.net

Knowing how to create working sets is key to a more manageable project space. If you’re handling more than a couple of projects, you will find this tip to be pretty helpful.

First click on the little arrow down icon, and click on “Select Working Set…”

By default, you should have no working sets, so let’s create one by clicking on “New…”

I haven’t tried what other types of working sets will provide, but really, we are more focused on managing our flash explorer at the moment aye?
Click on “Flash” and then “Next >”

Over here in this view, is the place where you specify what you want to show in your working set. If your project used some open source frameworks, it’s best to “turn them off” since you’re never going to use them directly. Basically, it all boils down to what you want to get shown.

*A very important note* that I want to highlight is that there are three types of checkboxes as you can see from the above screenshot: empty, tick, and square.

Empty and tick types are common, but what’s square? Square means that some folders or files in it are selected, while others are not. And because of this, you have to note that if you add new files or folders into these “squared” folders, you have to *manually update* these new folders or files.

This brings me back to my previous tip, knowing how to configure your build path. If your .swf files are in the root folder, each time you have a new file, you have to update your working set. Placing them all in the “bin” folder will always keep them updated. Sweet!

Once you have created your working set, don’t forget to check it before clicking “OK”. If you have multiple working sets, you can even check several of them to view them in your flash explorer all at the same time.

Viola, your flash explorer is now so much cleaner!

Do spend some time to play around more with working sets, because after a while, you’ll start to realise the power that it offers, allowing you to switch between projects very efficiently.

I guess most of us, when we create a new flash project in FDT, will ignore most of the initial options that we can play with. However, knowing how to configure your build path, which separates sources and eventual compiled .swf files into different folders, is important. Not only will your folder structure be cleaner, it can even set you up for a greater convenience which I’ll show in a future tip.

Let’s us now go through how to set up your own build path in FDT.

Here’s a screen capture of the dialog box when you create a new flash project.
Click on the second Configure defaults… as shown.

Which will bring you to the Build Path preferences.

Most people will usually name the output folder name as “bin” which stands for “binaries”, but hey, feel free to name it anything you want! When you compile your project now, the compiled .swf file will be placed into this output folder rather than the root of your folder structure if your default is empty.

It was bad of me to assume that everyone already knows their way around in FDT. To make up for it, here’s a tip for starters.

In the standalone installer version of FDT, it comes with two very short tutorials to help first timers navigate around the environment. They were useful to me, so I thought it will be good to check them out. Wouldn’t cost you anything more than 15 minutes.

In FDT, go to:
Help -> Cheat Sheets… -> FDT -> First Steps

In your new cheat sheets panel, you can now see the two tutorials ready and waiting for you to plow through them.

Once you start coding in FDT for a while, you may begin to realise that sometimes pressing Ctrl-F1 doesn’t bring up the quick fix. It kind of irritated me a little bit, and if it irritates you as well, allowing FDT to build automatically might just solve this.

Project -> Build Automatically

But wait, here’s a word of caution. I only recommend this if you’re building smaller projects, and that you did not use my code assist tip. The trouble that I encountered when my both my code assist is fully boosted and my projects are building automatically, is that the performance starts to go down.

One particular bad experience is that whenever I press enter on my code assist, not only does it _not_ completes my code, the editor jumps to the top of the page for no reason. After turning off the “Build Automatically” option, things were performing as they should again.

Ok, I hear you asking what shortcut key to press to build the project then?

That’ll be Ctrl-B, or Project -> Build All.

This is the tip that I loved most from what I discovered, so naturally it’s the first that I’m posting.

FlashDevelop’s code assist is awesome. After you type two characters, it will automatically pop up the code assist to help you complete the job. It was in fact so awesome, I almost couldn’t pull myself away to use FDT for big projects.

For the uninitiated, to trigger the code assist in FDT, you have to press the Ctrl-Space, or a period “.”. That seriously hindered my productivity and quickly became my biggest gripe, which is understandable if you compare to how FlashDevelop handles it.

After digging around the settings, I found gold. Here’s how to boost up your FDT’s code assist to perform just as superbly as FlashDevelop’s.

First go to:
Window -> Preferences -> FDT -> Editor -> Code Assist

In the field “Auto activation triggers for AS2:”, change the “.” to anything that you want!

For mine, I changed it to:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_.:

a-z : covers all my typing needs
_ : covers property names
. : covers after every dot notation
: : covers data typing

So there you have it! This small little change gave me at least a 25% coding speed boost without all the Ctrl-Space, Ctrl-Space, Ctrl-Space!