Flex Stuff by Gilles Guillemin

As explained the other day in this previous post, the new version version of Adobe Flash Catalyst Beta 2 doesn’t allow access anymore to it’s preferences so you cannot set it to refresh automatically. It’s kind of a pain when you use my synchronization tool, CatalystBuilderSync, as the synchronizations with Flash Builder do not reflect anymore in Catalyst.
So I’ve been digging a bit into Catalyst architecture and found an easy fix for that. You just need to edit the following file, depending on your platform (attention, .metadata is usually hidden by default):

• On Mac:
  /Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash Catalyst/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.core.resources.prefs
• On Windows 7 (and probably on Vista but unverified):
  C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Flash Catalyst\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.eclipse.core.resources.prefs
• On Windows XP:
  C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Application Data\Adobe\Flash Catalyst\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings\org.eclipse.core.resources.prefs

Open one of those and add the following line:

refresh.enabled=true

Save, restart Catalyst and that would do the trick. I’ll simplify the whole process in CatalystBuilderSync next update, hopefully in a couple of days.

[Edit: there's a workaround for the preferences issue here]

I’ve been literally sucked up into a black hole of work recently (hence the obvious lack of activity on FlexStuff.co.uk), but not to the point I couldn’t check out the brand new Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 and its counterpart Flash Catalyst Beta 2 (like all good geeks I like novelties). So I took a couple of hours to see how the two of them behaved with CatalystBuilderSync and for what I’ve seen so far it’s still all good, with the usual caveats (not all your Flash Builder 4 code will necessarily play well in Catalyst). It looks like my approach remains entirely valid and I suspect it’ll remain valid even after Catalyst 1.0 release, but I can be wrong and obviously Adobe doesn’t warmly encourage this approach according to Andrew Shorten’s (excellent) article: Exploring Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder workflows:

Other workflows

Whilst not an official list of recommended workflows, the approaches described in this article are all supported within the current versions of the Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

There are a number of third-party tools and alternative workflows that you might like to consider as you work with Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder; these can often improve productivity further for advanced developers. Note, however, that some of these tools may use unsupported or non-recommended approaches that may not work with future versions of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

So CatalystBuilderSync works well, BUT (of course there has to be a but) unfortunately Adobe limited one thing in Catalyst: there’s no right-click available anymore in Catalyst’s code view. Which means you can’t manually refresh the content of your project folder nor access Catalyst’s preferences in order to activate the Automatic Refresh (as explained in this previous post). There are a couple workarounds (like switching back and forth between design and code view or saving Catalyst project then choosing “Revert” in the file menu) but it’s a bit of a shame as we’re not children and I don’t really see the point of removing this functionality (now I’m also doomed to use the system’s default browser which is all but a convenience for me). I guess there must be somewhere in Catalyst some .ini file to edit (after all Catalyst is just another Eclipse distro) but I must say I don’t have a clue where this might be.
I’ll keep searching when I have the time but if someone has a suggestion I’d love to hear it. Now the good thing is CatalystBuilderSync is still working and it’s even more useful now with all the new Catalyst’s functionalities.

Like some others I’ve been working a lot recently in trying to improve the Adobe Flash Catalyst / Flash Builder workflow. I came up with a partial solution not so long ago, but it wasn’t exactly seamless and it most definitely needed a tool to act as a middle-man, to simplify synchronization between both softwares.

This is that tool: CatalystBuilderSync

And more than a long story, the second of a series of screencasts I’ve recorded yesterday should give you a good taste of what CatalystBuilderSync is capable of…

Remember, it’s a very early alpha version, so bugs, hiccups and other funny things are to be expected (and to be reported so I can fix them at some point).

You can download the latest version and give some feedback (I really need them) here:

CatalystBuilderSync 0.6.2

And please spread the word, I feel like this tool should be of interest to many of you.