Best Firefox add-ons for Flash developers and other useful Flash development tools

Here is my list of what helps in Flash development.

The best Firefox Flash plugins are:

Flash Tracer – allows seeing all the output generated by the "trace" flash functions while running any .swf Flash file in your browser. To run Flash Tracer, you need Flash Player debug installed in Firefox. Also, you have to enter a path to the file with debug info, for example C:\Documents and Settings\{user}\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\flashlog.txt.

Flash Switcher – allows switching between various Flash Player versions with a few clicks.

Web Developer – must have plugin for all web developers, but can be of use for Flash developers too. I like resize option and lots of other web developer tools also simplify everyday work.

Load Time Analyzer – allows developers to measure and graph how long web pages take to load in Firefox.

Muspell – allows testing variables in flash files in addition to modifying their values while they run to provide alternative methods of debugging and testing their flash applications. The only problem is that the last available version of Muspell is for FF 2.

Tamper Data – allows tracking Flash activity in Flash websites which load external data or communicate with backend scripts.

HBXTracer - helps developers to test HitBox implementations on HTML pages and Flash content.

Search plugins – here you can find five amazing Firefox search plugins for Flash and Flex developers to search ActionScript 3, Flex 2, Flex 3 LiveDocs, Adobe Labs and Macromedia Flash 8 directly from Firefox search bar.

Two more tools for Flash developers I like:

Charles - is especially useful for Adobe Flash developers as you can view the contents of LoadVariables, LoadMovie and XML loads. Charles also has native support for Flash Remoting (AMF0 and AMF3) that makes it better for debugging and tracing .swf files than, for example, Firebug add-on.

SWFAddress - SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash. It's a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state.

I hope my list will help you in Flash development and I wait for you to add your favorite tools to the list!

2 comments:

EricLewis said...

I mostly used “Flash Switcher” add-ons for flash development. It provides flexibility to switch one flash version to another version.

Leon Victor said...

“Download Flash and Video” is Best Firefox add-ons tool for Flash Development. You can download any flash file on the web plus Flash games on Facebook or any other web site of Flash games. Compatible with DownThemAll and NoScript and downloader is very easy to use.