Ok, this title doesn’t make sense if you haven’t read the article which goes against the concept of title, but I find it funny!

So here I was looking for a solution to the problem I think every Flash Developer most have had: I can trace fine when I am in the Flash IDE but sometimes I need to test in the browser and then I loose my traces…

Easy solution: use a logger tool like Alcon or MonsterDebugger.

Problem: it’s annoying. When you are at the point where you need the extra logger you need to find the ActionScript classes to make it work blabla.

What I want is an elegant solution that when I test locally it uses the trace and when I test in the browser it uses the logger. I was already using the snippet for trace in FlashDevelop so I thought I could make a snippet that would have this if statement and do just that. My first bump in the road was the fact that I didn’t know how to add an import statement when using a snippet at a different place in the code.

So while looking in the FlashDevelop forums I came upon FDTracer. Well it doesn’t exist anymore, it was a pluggin before but it is now an integral part of FlashDevelop. Turns out I always had it under my nose but I never knew about it. It would be nice if in the interface they actually tell what it is and how to use it.

So here are a couple of pictures to show you where that logger is. In FlashDevelop, under View it is called Flash Log Viewer and is by default one of the tab at the bottom of the program:

What this thing does is that it reads the logs that the Flash Player writes on the computer. You see, when you put the final swf on the server and the user plays it in his browser, all of your trace statements are written in the log file. That is why leaving trace statement in your final release is not that good for performance. Anyway one last thing to know is that you actually have to start it before it works. So press the little play button and start seeing your trace.

What is cool with this little thing is that it will work locally and in the browser, you don’t have do to anything(execpt press play) to make it work. Also if you feel spyish you can check the trace from Flash website made by others.

So yeah, please clean your traces…