I really like Flash Player 10 :D

Setting up a development environment with Flash Player 10 and Flex 3 wasn’t too hard, and all the tools are free! Here’s how I set things up (on two OS X machines, 10.4 and 10.5):

Bare minimum:

1. Get the Flex 3 compiler, and tweak the flex-config.xml file according to the “Command-line Compiler” section on that page.
2. Move the flex-sdk-3 folder to /Developer/SDKs. Add the flex-sdk-3/bin directory to your $PATH. Now you should be able to use mxmlc (compiler) and fcsh (incremental compiler!) from the Terminal.
3. Download the Debug Flash Player from Adobe’s repository.

Now you can create a Flex project (I created a skeletal .mxml file that wraps a pure Actionscript 3 application), and compile it using either mxmlc (for a one-off) or leave fcsh running in Terminal, for very rapid compile times.

But wouldn’t it be nice to set up a TextMate macro to compile your project in fcsh with a single keystroke? Of course it would.

TextMate integration:

1. Install the Actionscript 3 and Flex bundles for TextMate.
2. The “Compile using fcsh” script requires the iTerm application.
3. iTerm uses the bash shell, it doesn’t know where mxmlc and fcsh are. Add aliases to your ~/.profile script (or ~/.bash_profile in 10.4), like: alias mxmlc=”/Developer/SDKs/flex_sdk_3/bin/mxmlc”
4. In TextMate, set your shell variables. Noah Little has an article that will help. I had to set TextMate’s TM_FLEX_PATH (points to my flex-sdk-3 directory), and my project’s TM_FLEX_OUTPUT, TM_FLEX_FILE_SPECS, and TM_PROJECT_DIR.
5. In the bundle editor, the keystroke for Actionscript 3’s “Build using fcsh” is command-B. Change this if desired.
6. I modified the bundle script’s compile directives, due to Security Sandbox violations — I’m building an app which runs outside the browser, and loads resources from the file system, so I dug into this file:

~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/ActionScript 3.tmbundle/Support/bin/build_with_fcsh.sh

And added this mxmlc directive to the osascript line near the end: “-use-network=false”

Resources and stuff:

Here’s the complete Flash Player 10 API documentation.

Here’s a list of the new FP10 features.

The 3D rendering has an apparent clipping bug, hopefully that will get ironed out soon. I get unpredictable results when I change the rotationX and rotationY of a Sprite that contains other Sprites with their own 3D space.