I’ve been a die-hard Windows guy for a long time, but this year I switched to using a Mac so I could learn some iOS development. Since I made the switch, there are a few PC-only programs I miss. One of them is FlashDevelop – which I use(d) for all of my Flash/Actionscript work.
Flash is dying – that’s a fact. Not many new projects are being built in Actionscript these days, but I still get some Flash work trickling in now and then. I’ll also have a need to maintain or update older Flash projects for a few more years, so I need a good Actionscript IDE on my Mac. I tried running FlashDevelop on Parallels, but there were a few nagging problems with it that made it less than optimal. After doing some research on Actionscript IDEs for the Mac, I settled on Intellij IDEA. I was already using PHPStorm and I liked it a lot, so I thought I would give Intellij a try.
It’s been a great IDE for AS3 work. I like it almost as much as FlashDevelop, but the documentation is lacking a bit. Figuring out how to tweak the project settings was a hassle, so I made a video tutorial showing how to set up an Actionscript project in Intellij IDEA:
BTW, Intellij IDEA is an awesome all-around IDE that is definitely worth the $200 license. I use it for basically everything. Check it out for all of your HTML, CSS, javascript, PHP, Ruby, Rails, and JAVA needs.