Output Panel

One aspect of working in flash is seeing output from trace calls. Working in a browser access to that was limited except through a browser plugin flash tracer, but it only worked in Firefox. Why not build our own to extend all the features a developer could need for debugging.

The output panel and flash tracer

By default the tools were large text boxes and the traces from Flash were simple trace commands, like print statements or echo.

A separate effort was happening to create a library with robust logging options. The Tornado logging library wrapped trace calls with the date/time of the log, category of log, level of log and details of the object being logged.

While great, this also allowed the kitchen sink of what was happening to be logged, which was hard to wade through in the browser.

We created a standalone AIR application that could connect to the flashlog.txt file that contained all the debugging statements if one was using the debug player. We then hooked it up to a more advanced UI that featured regex filtering. We had plans to enhance this further with start/stop listening functionality and to export logging content to files.

We looked to create tools to make the development experience, especially in browser, better.

No images are available of this legacy project.