Software

This installer adds ActionScript syntax colouring and a Test Movie in Flash command to the awesome TextMate editor for Mac OS X. Test Movie in Flash works with .fla files added to your project (hit Cmd-Rtn with a .fla file selected), although at the moment TextMate displays binary files as text, which for a large file can be slow. Hopefully this issue will be dealt with in the upcoming 1.0.1.

I wish I’d had the benefit of this article a few months back when I was setting up my Subversion server. Although the svn documentation is excellent, it’s good to see a Mac OS X specific tutorial. Installing Subversion (plus dependencies) using DarwinPorts is really simple: just cd to your darwinports/dports/ directory and type sudo port install subversion +mod_dav_svn. Instructions on how to install DarwinPorts are here. I put together a Subversion startup item (installed into /Library/StartUpItems/), although really this is just an Apache2 startup item, but I called it Subversion since that’s all I’m using Apache2 for.

(New: see also ActionScript for TextMate) I had this working previously in Project Builder, but the specification files were broken in Xcode. Thanks to the C# versions I found here, I’ve been able to update these for Xcode. This installer adds two files, ActionScript.pbfilespec and ActionScript.pblangspec to /Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Specifications, adding ActionScript syntax colouring and code completion (press opt-esc) to Xcode. Update: Sam Robbins updated ActionScript.pblangspec to include component methods and properties.

Although one of the early Flex beta installers for Linux also worked on Mac OS X, this is no longer true for the 1.0 release version. However, this doesn’t mean it can’t be installed. All you need to do is extract the WAR files from the installer: unzip -d flex flex-10-lin.bin (extracting the contents of the archive to a new directory ‘flex’ in the working directory). These will be in the dist directory at flex/R_/dist.

If you’ve spent any time, as I have over the last year or so, working with Flash as the presentation layer for Java-based webapps, keeping as much of your ActionScript as possible in text files so that you can integrate these with your version control system along with your other source files, and wishing you didn’t have to use the Flash authoring tool to compile your movies, Flex (formerly Royale), a “standards-based programming methodology for building the presentation tier of Rich Internet Applications” from Macromedia (now in beta) might just be what you’re looking for.