Tech Dev

Using Adobe Flex Builder 3 on a Mac

Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, July 11, 2008 @ 4:44 pm

I've made a recent switch from Windows (Vista) to Mac (OS X 10.5.4). In these two months I had enough time to evaluate all biases that I was carrying with me for the past decade, including the one about coding on a Mac.

+ = :-)

I was very wrong about Mac. And I was very wrong about coding on a Mac. In a nutshell, my productivity went up considerably since the switch. On a day to day basis, I use primarily Flex Builder, then Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, an FTP client and as of today Snackr.

Flex Builder 3 acts exactly like it does on a Windows machine, with all the blessings and bugs included. No difference at all (I've been using Flex since 2.0 was released on Windows). Productivity boost comes from OS's fantastic interface which allows me to switch windows, not get bothered by focus steeling, run multiple screens with ease, find stuff easily (spotlight), organize files easier and more.

I use Firefox 2 as my primary testing browser, although Safari works just as well. I used to say: "I don't test for Mac, who cares, it's a small market anyhow..." but now I get to test on a Mac "for free".

I initially wanted to install a Windows VM, but so far I don't see the need.

So if anybody wants to code AS3, Mac is the way to go.

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tech development Tech Development

Comments: 2 so far

  1. I’ve installed the free trial on both Mac and PC, and failed to get anything to completely work on a Mac. It keeps complaining about a missing HTML file - and looking at what is generated on the PC - the mac version seems to fail in creating the HTML page to actually run/debug the project. Ho hum. And i couldn’t find any answers on the internet!

    Comment by stephen d, Tuesday, July 15, 2008 @ 6:33 am

  2. Hi Stephen,
    There is only one parameter in Flex Builder that controls the creation of a HTML wrapper.

    It at: Project -> Properties -> Flex Compiler

    In the “HTML wrapper” box there is a “Generate HTML wrapper file” check box that needs to be checked.

    Personally I’ve never had a problem with that. I do have an issue when moving projects between Windows and Mac, but it’s in regards to Flex Builder not being able to locate asset files right away.

    To fix that I go to: Project -> Clean and it solves that problem.

    If you post the error that you are getting, I could help more.

    Comment by Sasha Dzeletovic, Friday, July 18, 2008 @ 11:28 am

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