FlashDevelop
For me ActionScript is the best part of the Flash platform and since the advent of AS3 I have begun to imagine how Pinocchio once felt. I’m a real programmer! But just as Pinocchio had to presumably deal with puberty, girls and self-loathing, real programming brings its own complications in way of abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism. For proper programming you need a proper IDE. The Flash authoring IDE is handy when it comes to animations and graphical layouts but to handle the code you need something which understands your demands as an OOP coder. There are some great ActionScript editors such as FDT and Flex Builder but for value for money, FlashDevelop can’t be beaten.
Free and open source, FlashDevelop provides you with many features including code-hinting, function generation, cope snippets and folder-wide searches, options that you’ll soon wonder how you lived without. Even small touches such as the ability to colourise the Output panel turn out to be pretty handy. If you’re still programming in the Flash IDE, grab it now. It represents such a significant step up that you’ll curse the day you ever have the misfortune to delve into the world of F9 and manually type out an import statement or an function for an event listener. You’ll feel like you’re wearing go-faster stripes. Made of Teflon.
Beanstalk
As ActionScript has evolved alongside Flash, so has the complexity of the projects and the teams involved. Many Flash developers (myself very much included) come from a background where projects were solo builds and concepts like synchronisation or reusable code seemed a hassle and a waste of time. This is where SVN and Beanstalk come in to make your life much easier.
SVN is a type of version control. This means it keeps track of changes you make to your code, the main benefit of which is allowing you to ensure that you, and anyone else in your team, are working with the latest version and that all previous versions are backed up and accessible at any time. If you want to get your hands dirty and or you’re working by yourself, you can run this locally or on a network, but to keep things simple we use Beanstalk. They will host your repositories (the libraries of code), handle all the technical side of things and present the package to you in such a user-friendly environment, complete with web hooks and integration with other web apps including Basecamp and Lighthouse, that you’ll want to give them a hug. On top of that their Starter package is free and the upgrades very affordable for teams of any size. All you need then is a SVN client (we use TortoiseSVN) and you should feel yourself glowing proudly, full of happy thoughts about teamwork and efficiency.
MonsterDebugger
We’ve all been there. Witnessing unexpected results in a browser environment and crying just for the want of seeing a simple trace statement. MonsterDebugger helps with that and a bunch more.
The very nice Monster guys from Holland have provided an AIR app that hooks into your SWF file through LocalConnection which means that wherever it’s running, be that IDE, desktop on in a browser, it can provide you with reams of data about your file and the sections of code you’ve ballsed up. Whilst it doesn’t tell you how to fix it, it does allow you to fully inspect any classes you set, dynamically change properties on the fly and monitor framerate and memory usage over time. Pretty smart, and we’re definitely looking forward to version 3.