Amethyst Actionscript editor

amethyst screenshotIt’s since the first time I used Eclipse that I’m waiting for an actionscript editor non eclipse based!

I never like eclipse and hated all its problems.
Unfortunately Adobe decided to implement its editor over eclipse and also other nice editors, like fdt, used the eclipse framework to build their own editors.
I used Visual Studio for a while but that was enough to make me fall in love with it.
Visual Studio is indeed the best editor at all, without doubts!
Finally I discovered an interesting project for editing actionscript projects integrated into Visual Studio.
Amethyst is still in beta and probably too premature to be used in large production environment, but it’s a great news for me.
I hope they’ll continue in the development and create a serious competitor for Flash Builder.
For more info visit their product page: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Amethyst-Product-Page

Alchemy installation problems under OSX

I’m writing this little issue I discovered today in the alchemy installation under OSX, in case someone else is having the same problem…

In fact, today I decided to makes a little swc library for an actionscript project using alchemy ( because of the lacks of union in flash ), so I downloaded the alchemy toolkit for OSX.


I spent a couple of hours trying to make it working on my Snow Leopard and because I’m not a shell and perl expert I finally moved to the linux toolkit under ubuntu ( even if on linux the Flex builder is really far to be usable!)
Anyway, this evening I decided to spend some more time trying to understand why when I was trying to execute the alchemy “gcc” script ( the ones inside the achacks folder, which is a perl script) nothing happened.
After long time with old style “print” debugging strategy, at the end I discovered an error in the “config” script in the main alchemy installation folder.
At this line (line 33):
if echo $MACHTYPE | grep darwin &> /dev/null; then
I had to modify it into:
if echo $MACHTYPE | grep -i darwin &> /dev/null; then
because the command “echo $MACHTYPE” outputs “x86_64-Apple-Darwin“, with the uppercase “D”.
In fact, after that modification everything finally worked!