Arthropod Saved My Life
It’s crunch time. I’m crushing my keys furiously to finish yet another week of projects with insanely tight deadlines. My little Yorkie is nipping at my heels telling me it’s time to dine and my wife is pleading for my attention to pick out furniture for the new loft. I need to finish the project, it needs to be done right, and it needs to be done fast, and I’m screwed!
That was what I was thinking anyway until I found Arthropod. I was having a problem seeing what was going on with my flash movies while they were trying to communicate with External Interface. My traces weren’t coming through in FlashTracer and I was doing my best ray charles impression with sub par success. I needed to see trace statements at the very least to have any shot at completing this project before sundown.
Arthropod came into my life on January 16th, 2008 and has already carved out a special place in my heart, I don’t know how I didn’t hear about it until now. It’s a simple idea executed very well that allows you to trace Debug.log(’something’) statements in an AIR Application on your desktop, you can also trace any DisplayObject and take snapshots of the stage. After setting up Arthropod I was finished in five minutes. I was getting an error because of a scoping issue and it couldn’t be easier to find after setting up a couple log statements.
Arthropod was developed by Carl Calderon and you should drop some money in his donation box like I did if you end up using the software. Contributions were also made by Lee Brimelow who writes theflashblog.com and Stockholm Postproduction. Great work Carl, you saved my life!
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January 16th, 2008? Don’t you mean 2009?
I’ll check this thing out. Thanks for sharing
I have been using Carl’s Arthropod for a while now, however it bugged me that it didn’t work like Flash’s native Trace() function.
I took the liberty of modifying the Debug class to work like the Trace() function with some added functionality. You can also see the class that is generating the log message.
To use, simply call the log/error/warning method as you normally would, but use different arguments.
Debug.log( this, “Say you wanted to see the x value of this clip.”, “x=”, this.x );
The first argument is always the reserved word ‘this’ which helps the Debug class determine the class making the log() call.
The other arguments are whatever you want to trace. You can use an unlimited number or arguments. The class will put a space between each argument just like Flash’s trace function.
The only drawback to this is that you cannot dynamically change the color of the message text. This has to be set in the Debug class. Sure, you could make some static variables, or add another argument, however I didn’t need the functionality and the options seemed inconvenient.
Have fun!
Here is the modified class: http://pastebin.com/fd5973d5
I gotta say its quite helpfull. I usually use trace statements to reveal where the issue might be. However, there was a memory leakage in one of the files I’m developing now.
Thanks to Arthropod I figured out it was the issue only when playing the swf in Flash IDE, as standalone app and online there was no leakage at all and the CPU used was much lower than I expected! So, thanks for sharing this useful tool!