Spurred on by Peter's latest post, I took the opportunity to install the latest Eclipse SDK on my new notebook, along with the AS Development Tool (ASDT) plugin for Eclipse and the Motion-Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler (MTASC). Everything was up and running in minutes and I must say that I'm impressed. I have to mirror Peter's sentiments: Why the heck didn't I try this sooner?

The Subeclipse plugin worked great in my initial tests and you can install it very easily by going to Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install... in Eclipse, followed by "Seach for new features to install", "New Remote Site" and entering the following URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update.

So far, I have an AME system which works wonderfully as an external AS editor. To tell you the truth, I'm not too interested in FAME (sorry, couldn't resist), but I wanted to give the whole thing a try so I tried to install the latest Flashout (version 0.1.7.9) but it wouldn't show up in Eclipse's preferences panel after copying its plugin folder to Eclipse's plugins folder. I am assuming that there's some sort of compatibility issue between it and the latest Eclipse SDK that I'm running (3.02).

I don't see myself working completely in Eclipse (even if I can get FAME to work) as I would miss the productivity boost of the visual layout facilities in the Flash IDE but if I had a live preview/layout view in Eclipse (similar to the IDE for Laszlo, version 2 of which has just been released, now supporting Laszlo 3.0) but outputting Flash... well, that would be *ideal*

[Update] Thanks to Alex, Flashout's now working. The tip is that you need to start Eclipse with the -clean option (from the command line, type eclipse -clean) as it apparently doesn't always update all plugins automatically on Windows machines.

The AME to FAME article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.