Add system excepthook in actionscript!

Imagine you’ve made a very huge flash application and many users will play with it every day.

Imagine they don’t have the flashplayer debug installed and at certain points they fall into undiscovered application bugs ( it’s impossible to have a real bug free application, we know this ).
Then, what happens? With the flashplayer debug installed you can see the traceback and you can also continue or dismiss the code execution. But without the debug player? The code will try to continue but probably at that point your application is broken and users will feel it more and more uncomfortable with it.
What I would like to have in flash, and probably you too, is a global system exception handling for those unhandled exception.
In this way you can both present the problem to your users and then also create a report system which will help you to improve and fix your own application!
Something like I did with SEPY years ago using the sys.excepthook of python:
When an exception is raised and uncaught, the interpreter calls sys.excepthook with three arguments, the exception class, exception instance, and a traceback object. In an interactive session this happens just before control is returned to the prompt; in a Python program this happens just before the program exits. The handling of such top-level exceptions can be customized by assigning another three-argument function to sys.excepthook.

Talking about dead projects…

Today I was watching some of the pictures from the last Flex 360 meeting in Milan ( on 7/9 April ) which someone posted on Flickr you can’t imagine my surprise when I saw this photo.

Unfortunately I dont know what they were talking about in the meantime, but for me just watching that picture gave me a sense of melancholy!

But… I don’t think the only advantage of SEPY was the “easy to use”, for what I remember it had tons of useful features..

By the way, are you sure that is a dead project?  🙂

SEPY 1.5.1

Due to various changes in latest version of SEPY, there was a major subversion change from 1.0.x to 1.5.x
Those are:

  • New left Panel rendering. The multline notebook has been replaced by a vertial custom notebook
  • Regular Expression Kit. Panel which allows you to test match/search regular expressions and create the ActionScript 3.0 code for using them.
  • Enhancement of the TODO Panel.
    Now you can define, using this panel, different words you want to be marked both in the right border panel and listed in the todo panel itself.
  • Import Classes panel. Search/Select which class to import in your document and manage a list of favourites classes.
  • Speed up improvement in the code autocompletion
  • Added “Match multiline mode” in Find&Replace in files

P.S. Installer is available for both Win32 and OSX (compiled on 10.4).
http://sourceforge.net/project/…id=114139&release_id=373747

Flying away… holidays!!

Before leaving for my holidays i just want to make a quick post about the recent SE|PY additions…

1. Quick search bar

sepy quick search

The new “quick search” bar at the bottom. Thanks to Eric Dolecki who suggested me a more usable and fast to use “search” control (thanks also to Eric new icons suggestions!)
I use Mozilla Firefox from more than one year, i love the way it has implemented the find bar, and I never thought at using it in SEPY? yes.. that’s true 🙂

2. Right border enhancement

This is directly taken from an Eclipse feature i like a lot.
For every bookmarked line or line with a “TODO” comment you will have in the right side of each document a small clickable rectangle, with different colors, which show you the absolute position of that line in the document.
When you move the mouse over that rect you will see a tooltip telling you the content of the line and click on it for move to that line.
Nothing particular, but I found it really useful.
It’s now possible to customize the words SEPY is looking for (not only “todo”, but what you want)
Moreover, with the last addition of a sqlite database once you open a document for the second time you will see all the previous bookmarked lines, and the cursor will be placed in the same position you previously closed the document.

MTASC compile

Last addition is the mtasc compile dialog.
Using this dialog window you can compile yuor script in SEPY using the mtasc compiler and see in the same dialog a preview of the created SWF.
BTW, I will leave for my holidays on Monday (destination Tallinn, Estonia).
See ya again by the end of August.. and great holidays to you all!!
http://sourceforge.net/

SEPY for OSX 10.4

SEPY ActionScript Editor running on TigerWorking on my new mac mini I finally managed to get sepy run for OSX (actually i made an installer for OSX 10.4).
I have fix the major platform related bugs, there are still some issues (such as mainmenu disappearing sometimes, import/export features), but on my first test it seems quite stable. Download it from sourceforge here: http://sourceforge.net/…&release_id=340616

I’ve also put a new testing Windows version here: http://sourceforge.net/project/…&release_id=340550

Update on SEPY 2

As I announced some time ago the project for re-writing from scratch SEPY is already started..
actually the framework is quite complete and at the state of art it’s a full basic text editor. Today I met Gabriele, the same guy who helped me in the preliminary phases of sepy1, and we decided some of the new SEPY2 guidelines and how we want to proceed..
SE|PY 2 will be made using a similar, but more more simpler, process as the one used by Eclipse, that is plugin based.
This can help us, but also everyone who want to extend it in the future, with panels (which will be completely independent from the main application), and document classes.
As regarding panels we’re still thinking at the best solution for the workspace management.. maybe a solution similar to the one used by Macromedia software.
any preference here?

BTW, the very first thing in the TODO list it’s indeed the autocompletion system, which must be written as powerful as possible, thus mantaining good performances. This is the first and the core feature, without that the editor could not live…

Other important features will be the support for Flex and all XML in general, maybe using DTD for the autocompletion (for xml files)…

If it will be possible, we have thought also in extending scintilla functionallity in order to have a custom lexer for “.as” files, with extended folding and colouring features.
for example:
//#region

//#endregion
will create automatically folds region…

I hope that basing on the experienced I made with python in the last 2 years and thanks to all the feedback I received during this period to be able to create a better tool for developing flash..

«Nuntio vobis magnum gaudium, habemus vincitorem»

The winner is: Jason Milkins ( www.mentalaxis.com )

It was not easy to find a winner for me and Giorgio within the many cool icons we’ve received.
But finally we’ve decided, thank you Jason!
I would like to say thanks to all the people who partecipate the contest, I really appreciate your effort! thank you all!!
P.S. Here we’re creating a table with an extract of others participants’ icons: http://www.actionscript.it/sepycontestall.cfm