FlashApe

Most of my flash career I’ve been lucky when it came to opening up someone else’s fla or code and trying to figure out what was going on. There have been someones that I thought were pretty bad, but nothing that I couldn’t follow along with after a minute or two.

However, recently I pciked up a little freelance gig where someone needed some extras built on to an almost-complete project for a cd. The project should have been easy, maybe a day at the most. I get the source files, take them home, open them up…and was completely shocked at what I saw. Code everywhere (some function repeated twice, misspelled keywords such as “gotoandstop”, and just blatant wrong usage of code), keyframes everywhere, movieclips nested n layers deep.

It was taking me hours to just follow what should have been a simple flow of logic. After stressing about it for along time, I finally remmebered about the movie explorer. I think this is the first time I have ever actually put it to use, and what a lifesaver it’s been. It des such a great job of sorting and searching all the code from everywhere in the fla, it was perfect for my situation. I love how you can search for a bit of code, and the movie explorer will find and list a matching string from any actionscript anywhere in the fla. Click on it once, and it brings up the code in the actions panel. Double click the code in the movie explorer and it will take you right to that particular clip or frame.

Pretty sweet. I haven’t looked if it’s still there in mx2004 yet, but I hope it is.