I recently taught a class at the MGFest in Washginton on animation with Actionscript. In doing so I had to find a good way to teach students using both windows and OSX how to program AS3 in an External Editor. For windows I was very comfortable showing FlashDevelop, a free open source editor, and personally my favorite to work with. Having started to work at home on OSX and having to teach this to other I decided to research a good editor.
The obvious leader is FDT from Powerflasher, who has an eclipse based solution that is well tied to the Flash IDE and the mxmlc compiler. Having used Flex builder for a while now I felt pretty comfy in this environment. the problem is I don’t like eclipse. the program itself is made to accomplish so much and I see this as its advantage and its downfall. it has always felt a bit bloated to me, and I have had slowdowns and simple problem with just color schemes I would like to use.
So with that I started to look at easier solutions. TextMate has always been a big favorite of mine for editing all sorts of documents. From PHP, HTML and CSS, and now to ActionScript I have found TextMate to be lightweight and simple, yet powerful. So I started a hunt for a bundle to help do As3 Development. that’s when I cam across a Blog post by Simon Gregory which included his Actionscript 3 and Flex Bundles which have since then been placed up on github.I ended up forking this project and started to work on some variations of my own. Nothing too amazing, just simple things I was use to in FlashDevelop, now I could accomplish in TextMate.
To make this easier I decided to do a Video Tutorial on getting everything setup. I apologize in advance as I have been sick and still decided to record this thing, so if there is some sneezing and stuffy nose madness, well I am sorry. Either way, the following is a link to the tutorial and all the assets I used. I really hope this is helpful for people getting started in Actionscript programming, and stay tuned for more on why I see Actionscript and Flash in general starting to push its way into Film, Motion Graphics and Television!.
Watch Tutorial : TextMate for Actionscript 3 Tutorial
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