When debugging flash sometimes you need to either debug in browser or check a past version of the Flash player or the new beta player to see how things are looking. Here is a list of some tools beyond the included debugging IDEs FlashCS3 and Flex2 that are helpful to making your flash projects more bulletproof.
Alcon (ActionScript Logging Console) is a lightweight debugging tool for ActionScript 2.0/3.0 developers that provide a way to output debugging information (traces) from the debugged application to an external output panel.
Flash Switcher extension for Firefox
This extension comes with all the currently published flash player plugins (from the version 2 to the most recent 9,0,16) and allows you to easily switch from one plugin to another, or also to remove the currently installed plugin (maybe for testing the express install).
Debugging AS3 with firebug’s console
When using Firebug (a web developers Swiss army knife for browser debugging) you can also use actionscript to write to the firebug console with this class from marcosweskamp.
A logging API and output console for ActionScript
XMLObjectOutput is a really cool tool for debugging when you are writing Flex Apps. It is somewhat similar to CFDump and displays the structure of any Object in Flex.
DebugIt - Displays traced data in a seperate SWF so you can debug outside of Flash, while running your application in its shell/production environment.
Print_r Debugger - Brings PHP‘s “print_r” to Flash, invaluable once you start to use it. Free, Complete Source Available
Sock4Log - JAVA application which displays traced data from SWF and other (PHP,JS…). Could be a command line or windowed application.
Flex-Spy allow you to inspect and dynamically change most properties and styles of the visual components in your Flex application.
It is a firefox add on that displays trace() output in a sidebar window.While running any .swf Flash file in your browser you can see all the output generated by the “trace” flash functions in this sidebar component.
For real-time debugging and spying on your code. It is 16KB for the connector that you add to your files but it is debugging in style. If you have any issues with a live app or to help during testing Xray is great. It also includes a nifty admin site that allows you to access objects and spy on your code at any time.
LuminicBox.Log
Main features:
* Multiple output levels (LOG, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL)
* Inspection for Object and MovieClip types
* Multiple output targets using Publishers (similar to log4j)
* Flash 6 & 7 compatible. Flex is also supported.
* Small filesize, about 3kb with all available publishers.
* GUI Console for viewing and inspecting log messages.
