g.wygonik's flash experiments

since discovering the cool Flash player warnings and such, i figured a simple app to show the log file would be very useful.

enter AFTERTHOUGHT - Another Flash Tool, Explicitly Related To Hidden Or Undocumented "Genuinely Helpful Things"

of course i had to take it beyond a simple file viewer. here's a rundown of app's features:

• automatically looks for mm.cfg and determines:
   
• if mm.cfg even exists
• if tracing is enabled
• where the log file is located
   
• two filtering options:
   
• Show/Hide Flash player "Warning" lines (and informational output)
• Show/Hide user trace() output
   
• "watch" the log file for activity and updates the display "on-the-fly" - almost like a realtime Output Panel outside the Flash IDE(!)
   
• color-code the output ("Warnings" are red, informational text is gray italic, user trace is black)
   
• copy selected text to clipboard
   
• clear the on-screen display (and perhaps the log file too)
   
• major features from the menu are also in a context-menu over the text area

not bad for a few hours of work - gotta love .NET :-)

oh yes - since the Debugging configuration stuff appears to only be for Windows, i opted for the ease of C# to make this app. so you'll need the .NET runtime installed - but you should already have that installed because you've already been using Mike Chambers' Flash Resource Manager app, right? :-)

there are a few things i need to fix and add before i'll release it, but that won't be for a couple of days (see below for why).

if you really want to play with an alpha version, you can download it here - but remember it will just be replaced in a few days.

some things to note about this "alpha" release:

• real-time update isn't working correctly. basically you'll have to manually update the display using the "Rescan for Log File" option. either the Flash player is locking the log file, writing to it in some weird way that doesn't trigger a Windows "change" notification event on the file, or something else my wee brain doesn't know. auto-update works fine if you manually update the file and re-save it. the reason it will take me a few days to fix this is that my dev machine at work is so whacked i can't actually get the Flash player logging to work there. but i also can't update to XPsp1 because the installer "doesn't support my version of Windows" (uh, XP Pro isn't supported by the XP Service Pack?!)... so that's just my work machine.
   
• the app is a fixed-sized window. i'll probably make it resizable, but for now it's not.
   
• i will probably make the "clear" option clear out the log file too - providing Flash isn't doing some weird locking on the file (see real-time update above)
   
• this tool is COMPLETELY UN-SUPPORTED and i make no guarantees this won't completely destroy your hard-drive (though it really shouldn't - i mean, it hasn't destroyed mine and i've run it many times today on two different machines)

i fully plan on releasing the C# code with this too, so someone can perhaps enhance it into a more robust app - like creating the mm.cfg file and setting options in it, and also perhaps working with the mms.cfg file and it's settings, or whatever...

all for now. enjoy.