This will likely be of interest to most Flash Developers fortunate enough to be working on a Mac.

Since I recently stopped using Firefox due to its ever increasing size and annoyance of download requests every time I opened it, I chose to switch over to a much slimmer Safari. The only thing I really missed with Firefox was the Flash Tracer extension, which allowed me to see what was going on in the flash files loaded into Safari. So why not come up with a widget to make that happen. So I decided to download the new xcode development tools provided by Apple. It comes with a handy graphical tool for making osx dashboard widgets. After a few evenings of tinkering with the program I came up with my first widget, it is similar to Firefox’s Flash Tracer extension but will allow you to use any browser you want and has a few more features. It uses Ajax to load the flashlog.txt file generated by the flash player (debug version) and parses the data for displaying properly. Pretty strait forward but very useful for any flash developer I would think. All I do is hit the corner hot-spot that loads my dashboard and the flash tracer widget appears showing me all the guts of my flash files that are running in my browser.

I’ve also added a few features to the mix that you don’t get with the regular Flash IDE.

Features

1. Ability to play or pause the readout
2. Wrap the display text
3. Clear all the text in the readout
4. Adjust the font size
5. Invert the readout so the newest line will be at the top of the list rather than the bottom
6. Set how many statements can be in the readout ( between 1 – 100 )
7. Hide warnings
8. Put a line number before each statement (useful for wrapping text)

Instructions

1. Download and install the latest Flash Player debugger version.
2. Download and install the Flash Tracer Widget.
3. It should automatically find the flashlog.txt file generated by the new flash player you just installed. If it can’t try inputting your equivalent of this location…(/Users/[USERNAME]/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt).
4. Visit a website that outputs trace commands such as Rolex.com and watch the magic.

Screenshots

Let me know if you have any questions/comments or feature requests. I would love to improve upon it if I can.